Honolulu Office High-Rise to Become 230-Key Hotel

By Adriana Pop, Associate Editor

Waikiki Trade Center, a 22-story, 248,000-square-foot mixed-use high-rise in Honolulu will soon be repositioned into a yet-to-be-named boutique hotel.

Waikiki Trade Center in Honolulu

The building’s owner, San Francisco-based Coastwood Capital Group, partnered with San Francisco-based advisory and investment firm The Chartres Lodging Group LLC to complete the conversion.

Plans call for 230 spacious guestrooms, an eighth-floor pool and entertainment deck and a mix of street and mezzanine level retailers, the Pacific Business News reported. One of the retailers will be Nordstrom Rack, which plans to open its second Hawaii store at the center in the spring of 2016.

The cost of the entire project is estimated at approximately $61 million, with completion scheduled for the fall of 2016. Honolulu-based The Queen Emma Land Co. is the owner of the land where the building sits.

Kokua Hospitality, the management arm of Chartres Lodging, will provide renovation support, pre-opening tech services and property management services. Upon completion, the new hotel might operate under the Hyatt Centric brand, which caters to business travelers.

According to the newspaper, the redevelopment of the Waikiki Trade Center will bring needed hotel rooms to the market, which lost more than 5,000 rooms since 2000. At the moment, the high-rise is less than 20 percent leased and used primarily as an office building.

Photo credits: CBRE