Hotel Sellers' Market Softening?

<H1> Hotel Sellers' Market Softening?</H1>A decline in the hotel seller's market is in sight, although still several years away, analysts at PKF Consulting and Smith Travel Research said.

"The line between supply and demand will begin to narrow next year, although we'll have another year or two of slightly increasing occupancies overall before we see the drop," said John Fox, senior vice presiden at PKF Consulting, New York. Occupancies will actually drop next year in half of the top 40 U.S. cities because of increased supply, Fox said, yet few sizeable hotel construction projects will open before the year 2000.

Smith Travel Research also has tracked "signs that the rate of increase in demand is beginning to diminish, while the rate of increase in supply is accelerating," said vice president Chuck Ross. "On a national basis, the increases in demand still exceed the increases in supply-and should hold up through the decade-but the lines are converging.