Scotland attracts more Middle Eastern investors into US$18 billion tourism industry

Middle East – New research shows that Scotland continues to perform impressively well within European league tables for hotel occupancy levels. The total returns for investors in Scottish leased hotels have grown 9.5% year on year over the last five years.

The research, undertaken by Scottish Development International , the international arm of Scottish Government and its enterprise agencies, in association with MSCI, found that total returns from hotels ranked Scotland as the second best market out of 13 competitive European countries with regards to total investment returns in the leased hotel sector. Scottish hotels produced a total return of 15.2% year-on-year for investors in 2014. This reflects a further strengthening of performance from 2013, when a return of 9.2% year-on-year was recorded.

This annual research is conducted to look at the property investor return performance of leased Scottish hotels. It aims to provide insight and empirical evidence for real estate investors to consider hotels in Scotland as a mainstream investment within their portfolio. The study also found that:

The impressive Scottish performance followed an improving European trend for the hotel sector in 2014. The rest of U.K. hotels were the top performing in Europe with a return of 17.2% year-on-year, up from 11.3% in 2013. Overall, Pan-European hotels returned 8.9% year-on-year (in local currency) last year, up from 6.5% year-on-year.

Capital value growth of 9.1% year-on-year helped drive higher returns for Scottish hotels in 2014, when combined with an income return of 5.6% year-on-year. Capital values in Scotland have now grown by a cumulative 13% since the market crash in 2008.

Arab businesses have already started to invest into Scotland’s increasingly attractive market. MBI International which owns the Scotsman Hotel in the very heart of Edinburgh City Centre.