Andrew Dickey and Maciej Polek.
Andrew Dickey and Maciej Polek
Managing director; vice president at JLL’s hotels and hospitality practice
Andrew Dickey was promoted in January 2023 to his role leading JLL’s hotel investment sales in the Southeast, the Caribbean and Latin America.
That was only about three weeks before the biggest U.S. hotel sale of the pandemic era closed, a deal that Dickey worked on (and that he referred to in a January interview with Commercial Observer this year as “a team effort”): the $835 million trade of the 1,000-key Diplomat in Hollywood, Fla.
Now, most hospitality deals that Dickey and team work on don’t approach those titanic proportions. Rather, the deals usually fall between $75 million and $100 million.
And there have been a fair amount of them. JLL has the most active hotel and hospitality practice in Florida, and Dickey and Maciej Polek have been involved on many deals from the capital markets side. Plus, the partners are part of a larger JLL hotels and hospitality group that it says has closed more deals than any other similar adviser over the past five years — $83 billion worldwide. Dickey has worked on more than $7 billion in hospitality transactions with JLL, including $5.1 billion in deals and debt in Florida.
This work has included financing and/or development deals in South Florida for the Diplomat, the SLS Brickell Miami and the Royal Palm Miami, as well as the foreclosure of the Gansevoort South in Miami Beach. The team has worked with such brands as Fairmont, Kimpton and Mandarin Oriental.
Such activity was far from foreordained, no matter how popular the Miami area seems now. As recently as 15 years ago, hotel investors, especially foreign ones, looked past South Florida to larger domestic markets such as New York and L.A. Indeed, there was $600 million in hospitality investment sales in Florida in 2010, according to JLL. Last year, there was $3.4 billion, excluding direct and unknown deals. JLL handled 45 percent of that.
“When in 2010 no one was here, we were already here,” Polek said in a nod to Dickey, who has been at JLL more than 17 years (Polek’s been there for nearly nine years). “That’s the reality: We’ve been in this market a very long time.”
