Shamrock Hotel, favourite haunt of Bruce Lee’s family, to shut on June 14, as two in three rooms sit empty in Hong Kong’s recession

The nine-storey hotel, located on the corner of Bowring and Nathan roads near the Jordan subway station in Kowloon, will shut on June 14

The hotel sits on a 9,000 square-foot site that can yield about 70,000 sq ft of usable space with the potential of offering up to 108,000 sq ft (10,033 square metres) of space through redevelopment, valuers said

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General view of Shamrock Hotel on Nathan Road in Jordan on 5 June 2020 Photo: Edmond So

Published: 6:30pm, 5 Jun 2020Updated: 3:27pm, 8 Jun 2020

Hong Kong’s Shamrock Hotel, the favourite haunt of Bruce Lee’s family during the 1950s, will close after almost seven decades in business, bowing to a recession in the city that is leaving two in every three hotel rooms empty.

The nine-storey hotel, located on the corner of Bowring and Nathan roads near the Jordan subway station in Kowloon, will shut on June 14, according to staff contacted by South China Morning Post.

With 160 rooms, the four-star hotel may need to take a 40-per cent discount in its valuation, after failing to find a buyer when it was first put on the market in 2018 for HK$3 billion (US$387 million), valuers said.

“It is not easy to find a buyer at this moment, particularly for a [non-operating] hotel,” said Vincent Cheung of Vincorn Consulting, who values the property at HK$1.8 billion. Both office and hotel market are suffering from plunging rates. The best the owner or the new buyer could do is to turn the building into a block of service apartments.”

Hong Kong hotels were the biggest losers in Asia’s hospitality industry in the first-quarter, as travel bans and lock-down orders to contain the global coronavirus pandemic kept business travellers and tourists away, hitting the financial hub particularly hard. Average nightly room rate across all categories of hotels plunged 41.5 per cent in the city to HK$865 (US$111.6) during the first quarter, as an estimated two-thirds of rooms across the city sat empty, according to Colliers’ Asia Hotel report.

An undated image of Shamrock Hotel, which opened for business in 1952 on Nathan Road in Jordan. Photo: FACEBOOK.

The coronavirus pandemic, which sickened 1,100 people and claimed four lives in Hong Kong at the latest count, has added to the business woes of a city that is already in its deepest recession in decades. Thousands of events, shows, exhibitions from Art Basel’s contemporary art expo to Standard Chartered’s Hong Kong Marathon had been cancelled amid the outbreak, leaving hotel operators to watch in dismay as their rooms sit empty.