Braco hotel reopens under short-term lease
Published:Friday | February 17, 2012 | 12:00 AM
After nine months with no guests on property, the 250-room Braco hotel, owned by the National Insurance Fund (NIF), reopened this week.
NIF senior director for investments Audrey Deer-Williams said Wednesday that a short-term lease contract was signed in the first week of February with Blue Diamond, the hotel-operating arm of Sun Wing of Canada, to end in May of this year.
The property is operating as Braco Beach Resort & Spa. The terms of the lease agreement were not disclosed.
Deer-Williams also said that sale of the property might no longer be on the cards.
"It is being reconsidered at this time," she told the Financial Gleaner.
The NIF has tried but failed to sell any of its underperforming properties listed since 2009.
Lucrative property
The Braco hotel in Trelawny, before its closure last year, garnered the NIF US$200,000 monthly, and was the most lucrative property in its real-estate portfolio.
In September 2011, Cabinet had approved placement on the market of the hotel first known as Grand Lido Braco and later Breezes Rio Bueno while under the management of SuperClubs for 15 years.
On April 30, 2011 SuperClubs gave up the lease to the property, stating that its efforts to negotiate a mutually satisfactory lease arrangement with NIF had failed.
The NIF currently has only one resort property available for sale, the former Breezes Montego Bay hotel which has been closed since SuperClubs terminated that lease in 2009.
This property has been tendered, but no acceptable offers were received, Deer-Williams said earlier this year.
The value of NIF's total real-estate portfolio was last reported as approximately J$6 billion in commercial, resort and residential properties, or 10 per cent of total assets.
The state agency is sole owner of the Braco property, as well as other resorts such as El Greco Resort in Montego Bay and Point Village Resort in Negril.
The NIF is the agency responsible for investing pension receipts and is the manager of the J$62-billion to J$65-billion fund from which public pensions are financed.