Paramount Starts With Contracts for $400M

CHICAGO-Paramount Lodging Advisors, headquartered here, has contracts for the marketing of 45 hotel properties with a total valuation of approximately $400 million, says Daniel Beider, a founding member and principal of the company. The company will have initial offices in San Francisco; New York City; Charleston, SC; Richmond, VA; London; and Vancouver, Canada.

Paramount will have brokerage services for the buying and selling of hotels and will also have a variety of other services, such as finding hotel sites, asset management, construction and development consulting, valuations, executive searches and food and beverage consulting, says principal Philippus Miller. The company is currently marketing properties in 14 states including Vermont, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maine, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, California and Arizona and are also marketing properties in seven other countries including Canada, London and elsewhere in Europe. Paramount expects about 15% of the brokerage volume to initially be international, and to increase the percentage to 50% within five years.

The group decided to form the company at the NIU Hotel Investment Conference. The bulk of the initial employees are from NAI Global Hotels. Besides Beider and Miller, Sanjeev Misra and Stephen Mills and associates Jared Gibson and Adam Montufar previously worked for NAI. NAI is an international company that did not have “any hotel specific practice” before the group was hired about two years ago, Miller says. The group was successful “But, we were building the NAI brand rather than building a brand of our own,” he says.

Beider says that they had recruited principals Joe Ross and Stephen Potel when they were with NAI “and were unsuccessful in doing so.” Ross and Potel did not want to work for such a large company as NAI but were the first to be added to the newly formed company, Beider says. Principal Josh Williams was previously with Hilton Hotels and Forte Hotels and Jim Mouzourakis was previously with Allied Hotels. Walker Geyer is the founder and owner of NorthStar Capital Access. The principals have “non-brokerage” experience in the hospitality industry and have been operators, owners and developers of hotels, Beider says. “We know the hospitality industry inside and out,” Miller says. The company expects to announce soon the hiring on someone to handle the Southwest and to be located in Phoenix, Beider says.