Prices of Residences at Mandarin Oriental Honolulu to start at $3.5M January 15, 2019 Janis L. Magin

The developers of The Mandarin Oriental Honolulu hotel and condominium project near the Hawaii Convention Center plan to launch sales of the project’s 99 luxury residences next month with prices starting at $3.5 million, by marketing to current Mandarin Oriental clients before the start of construction this spring.

Manaolana Partners has hired Ian MacLeod, whose background includes working with high-end luxury real estate brands such as Ritz-Carlton, as director of sales for the $1 billion project. The developers are also finalizing a lease for a sales center on Kalakaua Avenue, not far from the project site at the corner of Kapiolani Boulevard and Atkinson Drive, where demolition of several low-rise commercial buildings was recently completed.

The 36-story building will have a Mandarin Oriental hotel on the lower floors, with a check-in desk on the 19th floor. That is where the 17 floors of residential units, which will have a separate entrance and elevator, will start. Mandarin Oriental residence units are not put into the hotel pool. Construction on the project will start once permitting is complete, as soon as April, and will take 30 months, putting the completion date in late 2021, according to Jim Ratkovich of Salem Partners, one of Manaolana Partners’ managing members. The developers last fall hired Robert Centra, a former construction executive with The Howard Hughes Corp., to oversee construction. MacLeod told Pacific Business News that after the initial round of reaching out to Mandarin Oriental faithful and real estate partners in Japan and other areas of Asia, a second round of sales will start to the general public.

Both MacLeod and Ratkovich said they were confident about the market for the units, whose prices will start at $3.5 million. “We got an awful lot of unsolicited preliminary interest from all over the world,” Ratkovich told PBN. “If that interest is any indication then we feel pretty good.” MacLeod said the primary buyer profile for the project is a wealthy individual or couple from Japan who also have “an affinity to Hawaii and the Mandarin brand.” MacLeod said they also plan to market to other wealthy buyers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Mainland China cities such as Shanghai. They may also market to buyers in South Korea or Malaysia as well, he said. “What’s interesting is we have quite a few registrations through our website,” he said. “We are seeing interest from London and Belgium and places like that.”

The building will also have 7,500 square feet of retail and restaurant space on the ground floor. The building was designed by [au]workshop architects+urbanists and Honolulu-based AHL, formerly known as Architects Hawaii Ltd. New York design firm Meyer Davis and Los Angeles-based Dianna Wong Architecture + Interior Design worked on the interior design, while Hart Howerton, based in New York and San Francisco, is the landscape architect and water features are being designed by Los Angeles-based Fluidity Design Consultants.