Among the nine U.S. regions, the West South Central region reported the largest increase in rooms under contract, rising 33.3 percent with 66,687 rooms.

STR;
In the U.S., projects under contract comprises 3,166 projects totaling 381,291 rooms, according to the May 2014 STR Pipeline Report. This represents a 13.7-percent increase in the number of rooms under contract compared with May 2013 and a 41.1-percent increase in rooms under construction. The rooms under contract data includes projects in the In Construction, Final Planning and Planning stages but does not include projects in the Unconfirmed stage.

"The Middle Atlantic region led all U.S. census regions with 22,668 rooms under construction—an increase of nearly 50 percent from May 2013," said Bobby Bowers, senior VP of operations at STR.

"Almost 70 percent of the region's construction activity was located in the New York-Newark-Jersey City MSA. The top three regions—Middle Atlantic, South Atlantic and West South Central—accounted for 60,635 under construction rooms, or roughly 60 percent of total U.S. hotel construction activity. Every census region experienced an increase of 20 percent or greater in rooms under construction versus prior year, with the exception of East South Central, which saw a 15-percent decline," he said.

Table - U.S. Hotel Construction Pipeline for May 2014
Source: STR

Among the nine U.S. regions, the West South Central region reported the largest increase in rooms under contract, rising 33.3 percent with 66,687 rooms. Three other regions reported an increase of more than 20 percent in rooms under contract: West North Central (+32.1 percent with 22,175 rooms); East South Central (+24.6 percent with 22,767 rooms); and the Pacific region (+23.5 percent with 48,041 rooms). The South Atlantic region ended the month with the most rooms under contract (76,399 rooms).

The New England region reported the largest increase in rooms under construction, rising 138.9 percent with 2,528 rooms. Three other regions reported increases of more than 50 percent of rooms under construction: the Pacific region (+69.6 percent with 12,422 rooms); West North Central (+60.8 percent with 6,636 rooms); and West South Central (+58.4 percent with 17,664 rooms).

Please note: STR recently revised the pipeline definitions. What was formerly known as the Total Active Pipeline is now referred to as Under Contract. The Pre-Planning phase also has been renamed to the Unconfirmed phase. 


About STR

STR provides clients—including hotel operators, developers, financiers, analysts and suppliers to the hotel industry—access to hotel research with regular and custom reports covering North America, Mexico and Caribbean. STR provides a single source of global hotel data covering daily and monthly performance data, forecasts, annual profitability, pipeline and census information. STR founded the STR family of companies and is proudly associated with STR Global, RRC and HotelNewsNow.com. For more information, please visit www.str.com.