At 68, with the help of daughter Jocelyn, he has built a second fortune in property by buying a string of 14 hotels stretching from Japan to Britain.

But the priority for the Kum family’s M&L Hospitality investment company is Australia. It already owns the nation’s largest hotel, the 683-room Four Points by Sheraton in Darling Harbour, as well as a string of city hotels in Sydney and Melbourne.

Perth is on the radar, while the low-profile family is about to pay more than $160 million building a third tower adjoining the Four Points above Sydney’s Western Distributor expressway, which will see the behemoth hotel hit a total of 913 rooms by 2015.

In Sydney yesterday to announce the new addition after two year’s wrangling with various government authorities, Mr Kum, his daughter, and executive officer for the M&L Hospitality group and chief executive, Neil Maxwell, flagged their strong intentions to build and buy more hotels here.

Mr Kum started amassing his hotel portfolio with the purchase of Four Points at the height of the global financial crisis in 2009 for just $185m — about $100m less than it would be worth today.

“I made a quick decision to buy this hotel,” said Mr Kum, who is ranked by Forbes as one of Singapore’s 50 wealthiest businessmen. “We told the agent we wanted to buy. He didn’t quite believe what I was saying. We quickly made the deal and I sent the money through as a deposit.”

That was December 22.

A day later, M&L Hospitality signed the deal to buy Sydney’s Swissotel for $90m.

“(In 2009) the money market was very tight, there was not much opportunity for investors to borrow and even if they managed to borrow it was not a big percentage of the acquisition price,” Mr Kum said. “(But) when I first arrived in Sydney to have a look at the hotel, I looked around and said to myself you can’t be wrong because the location is there and the hotel was doing pretty well. We bought it, despite the global financial crisis.”

For M&L Hospitality, the focus for hotels will never be the likes of five-star Four Seasons properties.

“We are in the more mature markets, the stable economies,” Mr Maxwell said. “Obviously, there’s never a downtime in London. Other (places to invest) would be Australia, we are keen on Hong Kong but it’s incredibly hard. We are quite keen to expand.

“(But) we are not into luxury or resorts; we are very city centric — a lot of our business is the domestic tourist.”

Mr Maxwell said the company had explored buying a hotel in Perth. “It’s finding the right opportunity,” he said.

“In Australia, the build cost is expensive, and finding the land is difficult. Initially we were not sure what we would build. Here it made sense to build more hotels, the issue is to find the site. If you look over the past five years, hotels have outperformed commercial (property).”

But it has not all been smooth sailing. M&L Hospitality abandoned a proposed float last year because of poor valuations in the listed market. But the idea has since gained currency as real estate investment trusts recover in Singapore and Australia, which are potential venues for any listing. Jocelyn Kum would not be drawn on the subject yesterday.

“We are constantly considering different options at the moment,” said the Melbourne-educated Ms Kum. “A float is just one possibility. At the moment the balance sheet is strong and we will continue to grow the portfolio and assess the markets. We are not bound by any jurisdiction. We have a lot of options open to us.”

For now the company is keen to continue its relationship with Australia, which began in 1989 when Mr Kum’s barges began operating off the North West Shelf. As he built up his shipping line Offshore Equipment, which he founded in 1976 to charter offshore support vessels and barges to the oil and gas exploration sites, he spent a lot of time travelling — exploring various hotel operations in the process.

He also believes money will continue to flow from China.

“There’s a lot of money floating around in China,” Mr Kum said. “The Chinese are very eager to take some of their money out of the country to invest overseas. There is also the consideration of having the family study here and to get the opportunity to learn how to speak English.

“Chinese will continue to send their children overseas to study and invest, and so will the Thais, Malaysians and Singaporeans. Australia is . . . integral to Asia.”

Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au

HT Editor