Company insight
Powering hospitality real estate deals
Sterling Technology, the leading European provider of premium virtual data room (VDR) solutions, recently supported CBRE on the sale of the Four Points by Sheraton Milan Center hotel to a leading US private equity buyer. Hotel Management International speaks to Domenico Basanisi, head of investment properties hotels, Italy at CBRE, and Sergio Sarli, head of sales, Italy at Sterling Technology, to find out more about this landmark transaction.
Could you tell us why this deal is so important for CBRE and the Italian hotel market within the wider European hospitality market? Domenico Basanisi: We started the sale process in early February 2021, when Italy was in the middle of its second lockdown and hospitality assets were closed. We had to create a compelling sales story, without any proof that the hotel’s performance would recover once it reopened. Fortunately, the market response was extremely positive. In the
The Four Points by Sheraton in Milan.
first round, we gathered more than 20 high- quality, non-binding offers, which was the highest number of bids we had ever received across any asset class. This was also one of the first deals completed in Europe in which the final price reached the same level as its pre-Covid valuation.
Could you tell us about Sterling Technology and how its technology solutions are supporting real estate transactions? Sergio Sarli: We support real estate transactions from capital raising, through due diligence on asset sales and ongoing portfolio asset management, providing clients with an easy-to-use, secure technology and 24/7/365 customer support that helps speed up their processes. Timing is everything in the real estate and M&A markets, so we want to help clients go very fast on their deals. Our customer support is the best in the industry. It is available in
Hotel Management International /
www.hmi-online.com
multiple languages, and our experts act as an extension of the client team. For instance, if our clients need to upload documents, rename documents, set up accesses or set up Q&As, our experts can do that on their behalf.
Why did you decide to choose Sterling Technology as the VDR provider to support your deal? What are the key features of Sterling’s technology and service that contributed to the success of this transaction? DB: The 24/7 customer care is one of the features we most appreciated, because you don’t need to worry about technical tasks – the customer service team will do it for you. This is such a great time-saving feature that is related not to the technology, but to the humans who are behind it. It is really important during the final phases of the deal when everyone is in a rush. We were expecting a massive number of documents in the data room, so we needed
a platform that would be able to manage a huge volume of data and provide a robust online Q&A system to manage the thousands of bidder questions we received. We were also looking for a platform with the highest levels of security that could grant privacy to all the different bidders who were involved. Finally, the Sterling platform is very intuitive and easy to use for both the sell-side and buy- side of a deal.
What is the future of Sterling’s VDR solutions for your customers? Can you provide some insights into your plans for innovation? SS: Sterling recently added two new AI-powered features: an automated redaction tool that allows customers to redact documents on a mass scale, and a translation tool, which can automatically translate documents into 18 languages. We also recently launched a fresh user interface that will further improve the intuitiveness of the platform. We have some more features coming, including an online MS Office viewer and a CAD viewer for viewing 2D and 3D models, for example for buildings. Finally, next year we are launching a new microservices-based platform, allowing Sterling to independently deploy different functionalities and make platform upgrades, all from the same core infrastructure.●
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