Ryman is paying $1.38bn for two hotels in Orlando, and the earnings figure that price was set against came from the seller
Eight hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars a room.
Ryman Hospitality Properties agreed on Monday to buy the fee simple interest in the JW Marriott Orlando, Grande Lakes and the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes for approximately $1.38 billion. The buying entity is RHP Property GLO, LLC. The seller is GLO Hotel Owner LLC, named in the announcement as Trinity Investments. Divide the price by the 1,592 rooms the two hotels hold between them and the figure at the top of this brief is what comes out, which is arithmetic on the company's own numbers rather than a valuation.
Fifty million dollars went into escrow when the agreement was signed. It comes off the price at closing. If Ryman walks away in material breach the seller keeps it as liquidated damages, and if the seller does the same the money goes back. Closing is expected in the third quarter.
The multiple and where it comes from
The announcement prices the deal at 12.5 times Adjusted EBITDAre for the twelve months to 30 June 2026. The reconciliation is printed underneath, and it is the more useful half of the page.
Net income for that period was $10.4m. Add back $57.8m of net interest expense, $39.8m of depreciation and $2.0m of items the company describes as non-operating and related to ownership structure, and the result is $110.0m.
Then read the sentence above the table. Adjusted EBITDAre, it says, is calculated and presented by Ryman based on unaudited information provided to it by the seller or an affiliate of the seller, and Ryman used it to price the acquisition. Nothing about that is unusual in a hotel sale. It is worth knowing anyway, because the multiple that will be quoted everywhere for the next week rests on a figure that was supplied by the party on the other side of the table and has not been audited by anyone.
What is actually being bought
The complex runs to 409 acres. The JW Marriott carries 1,010 rooms and the Ritz-Carlton 582, with roughly 320,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor meeting space between them, a 40,000 square foot spa, 14 food and beverage outlets, a waterpark, and an 18 hole golf course designed by Greg Norman. Approximately $150 million has gone into the property recently across guest rooms, meeting space and public areas, which is money the next owner does not have to spend.
Marriott International continues to operate both hotels under their existing brands.
Mark Fioravanti, Ryman's president and chief executive, said the transaction "expands our presence in the nation's top meetings market and creates the opportunity for meaningful portfolio synergies," and that Grande Lakes introduces Ritz-Carlton as a new luxury brand in the portfolio. Ryman's hotels are managed by Marriott and run to 12,364 rooms today, so the two Orlando properties would add about 13 percent to the room count.
The financing is the part the filing does not answer
There is no debt commitment described, no equity raise announced, and no purchase price allocation. The only statement on funding sits in the forward looking language, where the company lists among its risks its ability to fund the acquisition, whether by using funds borrowed pursuant to its credit agreement or otherwise.
BofA Securities and J.P. Morgan advised on the deal. Bass, Berry and Sims and Greenberg Traurig acted as legal advisers. Ryman expects the purchase to be accretive to adjusted funds from operations per diluted share in 2027, which is a statement about next year rather than this one.
