Manga pays $50M for second Manhattan hotel from Lam

Canada's Manga Hotel Group has paid $50 million for the Chelsean New York Hotel at 158-162 West 25th Street, its second Manhattan purchase from Lam Generation in eighteen months, with the 158-key, 2001-vintage building working out to about $316,000 per key, according to property records cited by Commercial Observer.

The Chelsean follows Manga's first Manhattan acquisition, the SoHo 54 Hotel at 54 Watts St., which closed in February 2025 from the same developer, and two transactions with one family-owned seller in roughly eighteen months give the deal the shape of an ongoing sourcing relationship rather than a one-off portfolio grab. Manga is large at home—35 hotels totaling 6,600 rooms, seven high-rise apartment developments, food and beverage operations, and airport parking—but it remains two deals deep in New York; its Canadian resume, including the country's first Hampton Inn and first LEED-certified hotel, marks the company as not the usual tourist buyer.

The per-key price falls from $350,000 to about $316,000 as the buyer returns to the same seller, PRED's prior coverage noted. The step-down is no clean same-asset comparison, since the two deals involve different hotels, but its direction is still useful: the second bite of the same seller's inventory came in at a lower per-key basis than the first, which points to Manga collecting a repeat-customer benefit—a cheaper entry into a tight market than bidding against strangers on a debut deal.

Lam Generation, led by Jeffrey Lam, is showing up the same way from the selling side: it developed the Chelsean in 2001 and had already sold SoHo 54 to the same buyer by February 2025, and a family developer does not usually go back to the same foreign purchaser for a second sale unless the first transaction closed the way both sides expected. The two-deal pattern does the work a first-time pitch would have to do from scratch.

With two Manhattan hotels from one seller, Manga now has a small collection and a method: buy again from a source it has already vetted. Whether that method is durable depends on Lam Generation producing a third asset; the per-key basis on that deal will be the tell.