Blasson and Axa Put Barcelona’s Hotel Sofia Up for Sale for €300 Million
Barcelona, March 13 – One of the largest operations in the hotel sector is slowly brewing in Barcelona. French insurer Axa and fund manager Blasson Property Investments, the two investors who bought Hotel Sofia in 2023 for €180 million, have put it up for sale just three years after its acquisition. Sources close to the operation confirm to Cinco Días that the price would range between €280 and €300 million, implying a valuation close to €650,000 per room.
The two owners have commissioned brokers Colliers and Eastdil Secured (it was announced yesterday that Savills has reached an agreement to acquire this British advisory firm) to handle the sale. Two factors are driving this operation. Firstly, the sharp rise in prices experienced by assets in the real estate sector, especially urban hotels, which has led to purchase operations such as that of the Hotel Miguel Ángel in Madrid for €210 million, representing an average price of €871,000 per room.
Barcelona’s Hotel Market: A Hot Spot for Investors
The renewed investor appetite for hotels in Barcelona has also influenced the buyers. In 2025, Barcelona became the second destination with the most operations, concentrating 17% of the total investment (€720 million), only behind the Canary Islands, with 24% (€1,039 million), according to the latest hotel investment report by the consulting firm Colliers.
If the sale of Hotel Sofia goes through, it will be the third time it has changed hands in the last five years. The hotel was owned by Selenta, the company founded by Catalan businessman Jordi Mestre, until in 2021, pressured by the hotel closures forced by the pandemic, he decided to sell a large part of his hotel portfolio to the Canadian fund Brookfield for €440 million. That operation involved the sale of four hotels (Sofía and Expo in Barcelona, Don Carlos Resort & Spa in Marbella, and Mare Nostrum Resort in Tenerife), totaling more than 2,200 rooms. In 2023, Axa and Blasson Property Investments bought Hotel Sofia for €180 million, invested €20 million in its renovation, and rebranded it as Grand Hyatt, with rates between €300 and €400 per night.
Brookfield’s Strategic Gains and Selenta’s Setbacks
In this constant exchange of the asset, located in the Les Corts neighborhood next to the new Spotify Camp Nou, the big winner has been Brookfield, which has monetized in record time one of the riskiest operations it undertook in Spain, by disbursing €440 million for a hotel portfolio of four assets in the midst of a pandemic with no certainty of how the business would evolve. In 2023, it sold Hotel Sofia for €180 million, and in 2025, it closed the sale of Hotel Mare Nostrum to the Spring Hoteles group for €400 million, which was the highest price ever paid for a hotel asset in Spain. The sale of Hotel Mare Nostrum alone represented practically the same amount of money it paid for the Selenta portfolio four years earlier.
The big loser has been Selenta, which in 2021 agreed with Brookfield to retain the management of the four hotels it sold. In 2024, it lost the management of Hotel Sofia in favor of the American giant Hyatt (the asset was bought in 2023, but did not open until a year later due to the renovation it underwent), and in 2025, it also lost the management of Hotel Mare Nostrum, as the buyer (Spring Hoteles) made it an non-negotiable condition for the acquisition to retain management. This way, it has lost almost 1,500 rooms (1,000 from Mare Nostrum and 465 from Sofia).
Currently, Selenta manages four hotels, all owned by Brookfield, totaling another 1,500 rooms. Two of them belong to the Selenta portfolio that it sold to the Canadian fund in 2021 (Don Carlos in Marbella and Moxy in Barcelona), and two others, both acquired in 2022, were outside that operation (Benalma Costa del Sol in Malaga and Marriott Plaza Princesa in Madrid). All of them are on the market, and the emergence of a buyer who wants to take over the management and operation of the asset could further reduce Selenta’s business.
Booming Hotel Investment in Spain
Hotel investment in Spain closed 2025 with a balance of €4,275 million, representing an increase of 28% compared to 2024 figures, and the second highest record in the historical series, only surpassed by the €4,810 million of 2018, according to Colliers’ investment report. These records could be surpassed this year if some large individual asset operations, such as Hotel Sofia in Barcelona or Hotel Bahía del Duque in Tenerife, are closed, and if some of the hotel portfolios that were not sold in the last two years come onto the market.
While awaiting that, the trickle of buying and selling, spurred by the high profitability of the assets, is incessant. The latest was announced on Thursday morning with Atom, Bankinter’s hotel REIT, announcing the sale of the AC Ciutat de Palma hotel to a local family office for €19.35 million, marking its tenth divestment since its constitution in 2018. In a statement, Atom acknowledges that, although the company initially did not contemplate the sale of this asset, “it received an offer under conditions that allowed it to generate significant value for both the company and investors.” In parallel with the sale, the company, with a portfolio of 23 hotels and a value of €885.8 million at the end of last year, has canceled the mortgage loan on the asset worth €7.08 million.
Source: Cinco Días
