The Water Street District of Tampa in Florida originally housed a military outpost at the mouth of the Hillsborough River and later became industrialised with railways and warehouses lining the waterfront.
By the late 1950s, however, industrial use declined, leaving the area, which is immediately south-east of downtown Tampa, neglected for decades.
That is until the 2000s when Cascade Asset Management Company took an interest and began buying up plots of land along the waterfront, mostly surface parking lots.
Cascade manages the assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. In the hotel industry, Cascade is best-known for being the largest shareholder of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts. Another highly significant Cascade project is the redevelopment of the Tampa Water Street District.
Revitalising the waterfront
Having amassed around 50 acres of land, the next step was to develop hotels. Jacqueline Eggins, real estate asset manager at Cascade, said: “There was an existing Marriott hotel near the waterfront and in 2014, we acquired it, fully renovated it, and then started building a JW Marriott across the street connected via a sky bridge and that opened in late 2020.”
She added: “This allowed us to have this new complex of hotels with over 1,250 guest rooms. There was never anything like this before in Tampa.”
The hotels are near the Tampa Convention Center and Benchmark International Arena (formerly the Amalie Arena), a multipurpose venue and home of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team.
“All the while we were building out this hotel strategy, Strategic Property Partners [the development arm of Cascade] has been busy developing out the rest of the district. SPP added three luxury apartment buildings; over half a million square feet of office; 200,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space; and another hotel: the Tampa Edition.”
Eggins is the asset manager of all three hotels, but this particular case study focuses on the performance of the original Marriott and the newly built JW Marriot.
Eggins explained: “Across the two hotels, we run ten restaurants and bars, we have a marina, two rooftop pools, a spa, and over 170,000 square feet of meeting space. It's a lot of meeting space. We purposely overbuilt the meeting space at the JW when we were developing that extra property so that we could house much larger groups and keep them on site.”
Spanning the entire rooftop of the JW Marriott is Beacon, the highest cocktail and dining outlet in the city.
Dual hotel model creates operational synergies
Looking at the asset management of these two hotels, firstly it was about taking advantage of operational efficiencies, Eggins said: “The whole point of having a dual hotel is to capitalise on shared departments.”
Those departments include the general manager, accounting, HR, sales and marketing team, executive chef, director of food and beverage, security, and maintenance.
“In some cases, we were able to elevate some of our employees to take on the new roles, but in many cases, we had to find candidates who were ready to take on the much larger scope of the dual hotels,” she said.
The second part of the asset management work was in the sales strategy: “All of a sudden, we now had 1,250 rooms, and the ability to attract new business to Tampa with groups of 1,000 or more for meetings and events, so we’re changing the landscape and getting that word out.”
Looking at performance, Eggins said that average daily rate (ADR) at the Marriott increased from $210 in 2019 to $280 in 2024; at the JW Marriott, ADR rose from $285 in 2021 to $340 in 2024.
While the Tampa hotel market has generally experienced reduced profit margins in the face of rising labour costs, thanks to the operational efficiencies derived from the dual hotel model Eggins said that the original Marriott hotel reported an improved GOP margin of 3.5 percentage points.
Tampa’s rise in group business rankings
The performance of the two hotels has contributed to the overall success of the Tampa hotel market. Group ADR benchmarking data provided by CoStar Group, shows that Tampa has risen up the ranks in terms of the rates it can command for group business.
Among eight cities (Nashville, Austin, Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa, Charlotte, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Orlando) Tampa’s Group ADR increased from approximately $180 in 2019 to around $240 in 2024, a 33 percent increase, taking its ranking from seventh to third place.
Eggins observed: “That's a huge, huge jump and Visit Tampa Bay [the city’s visitor and convention bureau] will attest that a lot of Tampa's growth has to do with the fact that we have this new dual hotel and we’re able to attract groups that need 1,000 rooms or more.”
The redevelopment of Water Street Tampa is an ongoing project and in April 2024, Strategic Property Partners announced the second phase (2025 to 2027) to expand the live-work-play neighbourhood northwards with more retail, green space, a central park, and new entertainment venues near the Benchmark International Arena.
All quotes taken from the IHIF NYU 2025 session: ‘Unlocking value: HAMA US Asset Management Achievement Award’