Sean Hehir.
Sean Hehir
President and CEO at Trinity Investments
In his 14 years at the helm of Trinity Investments, Sean Hehir has shifted the company’s focus from distressed debt and REITs traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange to pure play hospitality.
It’s possible that Hehir is simply being modest when he calls the firm of only about 40 employees in the U.S. a small shop, considering the scale and value of the properties it owns, but that size has allowed Trinity to zero in on the hotel industry, especially in South Florida.
“You can be a generalist if you’re Blackstone, Brookfield, Starwood Capital, etc., but when you’re smaller it is much better to be a specialist,” Hehir said. “What we’ve really done is position ourselves to be what we call the operating partner of choice for large private equity funds.”
Hehir and Trinity started 2023 off strong by doing what Fontainebleau Development’s Jeffrey Soffer could not do: buy the Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood, Fla. While Soffer’s Fontainebleau Miami Beach is still the only resort in South Florida larger than the Diplomat, his firm tried twice in 2020 and 2021 to buy the property for $800 million.
Brookfield had the resort on the market for about four years when Hehir’s team was able to close an acquisition deal with Credit Suisse Asset Management for $835 million.
While Trinity definitely has a niche, South Florida’s hospitality market provides the right kind of diversity, according to Hehir. “We focus on destination hotels, such as the Diplomat, where you’re not just reliant on the group business, but there’s leisure, there’s corporate, there’s all of those components,” Hehir said. “All that ends up being a truly irreplaceable type of real estate, and we’re very bullish on South Florida.”
Trinity entered the Florida market about five years ago with the purchase of Grande Lakes Resort in Orlando, followed by a joint venture with Certares Real Estate Management that led to a $174 million acquisition of Miami’s EAST hotel in October 2021.
