Royal George: likely to prompt keen bidding

A historic hotel has been put up for sale after 20 years of family ownership, and is expected to prompt serious interest in an active market.

The Anderson family is looking for £3 million for the Royal George hotel in Perth, which has been a landmark in the city since early Victorian times with an inn on its Tay Street premises for around 250 years.

Eddie and Lorna Anderson, and their son Ed Anderson are offering the Royal George via Colliers as a going concern and the market will be expecting overseas as well as domestic interest. Alistair Letham, a director in the UK hotels agency team at Colliers said it produces “regular profitability”. It recently leased the basement to Perth Gin, to develop and create a gin distillery on the premises.

Overseas buyers are likely to be drawn to a hotel in a key location and with a long history. The sale of Scottish hotels last year reached £902 million, a three-fold increase on 2017 (£195m).

The largest transaction was the £85m sale of Edinburgh’s Caledonian Waldorf Astoria to Twenty14Holdings among a list of hotels snapped up by foreign investors, undeterred by the Brexit negotiations.

International  parties remain the dominant investor group in Scotland’s hotels market, representing 76% of the market, according to property agent Savills.