BUSINESS BRIEFS
Fairmont Orchid goes for $250M
Advertiser Staff and News Services
Fairmont Hotels & Resorts Inc. has sold the 540-room Fairmont Orchid on the Big Island's South Kohala Coast to a Boston real estate investment firm for $250 million to raise money to buy other assets.
The sale of the hotel to Westbrook Partners LLC will be recorded as a pretax gain of about $109 million, Toronto-based Fairmont said in a news release. Fairmont, which bought the hotel for $140 million three years ago, will continue to manage the property.
This week, the Fairmont announced that its board rejected financier Carl Icahn's $1.2 billion bid to take control of the company, calling the offer "inadequate."
PARKER RANCH CENTER SOLD
The Parker Ranch Center in Waimea was sold to an affiliate of the Chicago-based M & J Wilkow Ltd. for an undisclosed price.
The center has 132,000 square feet of retail and service space, making it a regional shopping hub, with tenants including Foodland Super Market, First Hawaiian Bank, Bank of Hawaii and Kaiser Permanente.
The sale is part of a diversification effort by the Parker Ranch Foundation Trust, which supports trust beneficiaries including North Hawai'i Community Hospital, Parker School Trust Corp., Hawai'i Preparatory Academy, and the Richard Smart Fund, administered by the Hawai'i Community Foundation.
Parker Ranch is one of the largest cattle ranches in the United States, with about 175,000 acres across the Big Island.
UPGRADE COSTS VERIZON $22M
Verizon Wireless said it has spent more than $22 million this year to upgrade its Hawai'i voice and data wireless network.
The investment includes adding and updating cellular sites and other technologies to improve call quality, increase coverage areas and enable a variety of advanced services, such as text and picture messaging, the company said.
NEW-HOME SALES DECLINE BY 11.3%
Sales of new homes plunged in November by the largest amount in nearly 12 years, the most dramatic evidence yet that the booming housing market is starting to cool off nationally.
The Commerce Department reported that sales of new single-family homes fell by 11.3 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.245 million units.
Analysts had been expecting a drop of around 8.7 percent given that sales in October had jumped unexpectedly to an all-time high. But many said the size of the decline was a clear indication that the five-year boom in housing has peaked.
MAJORITY STAKE IN MSNBC SHIFTS
NBC is acquiring a majority stake in MSNBC from Microsoft Corp., giving NBC greater control over the struggling all-news cable channel and scaling back the software giant's media ambitions.
NBC will wind up with an 82 percent stake in the cable network, though NBC and Microsoft will continue to share ownership of the channel's Web site, MSNBC.com.
