So the Easter shift is a little, I would say, not as much impactful for our portfolio. However, what does happen with the timing of Easter, it does shorten the time that the resorts can really drive rates and demand. So therefore, April sort of in the short-term pickup is certainly slower. However, rates are still holding strong. What I can tell you with what data we have available as of right now, we don’t have the full month data yet, but April is trending effectively flat for the portfolio. But remember, that includes Maui. If you exclude Maui, we were actually closer to slightly above 1% for April. So overall, things are still looking very strong. And when we look at the sort of the second half of the year, what I will say is the group piece is looking extremely strong for the second half.
And that’s what really gives us confidence for the full year is we picked up 421,000 room nights for the remainder of the year and 60% of that was for the second half. So clearly, have tremendous confidence for the second half and overall total revenue pace is actually close to 9% for the second half of the year.
Operator: Our next question is coming from Aryeh Klein with BMO.
Aryeh Klein: Maybe just going back to Nashville, now that, that acquisition has been done, how are you thinking about future M&A? And perhaps which markets are of interest? Are there Nashville types markets that you’re not in that you’d still like to get into? And then maybe just on the overall M&A landscape, with rates seemingly higher for longer. Has there been any shift in the market? Have you seen assets pulled or anything like that?
Jim Risoleo: Yes. A couple of questions there, Aryeh. Let’s talk about the M&A landscape first. So I think there was a fair amount of anticipation among the brokerage community that we would see a pickup in transaction activity as the Fed moved to lower interest rates. We haven’t seen that happen yet because of where the Fed is sitting. However, I believe that there are some owners out there who will be sellers now because they just can’t afford to wait any longer and for a lot of reasons. I mean, they haven’t invested in their assets over the course of the pandemic. They may have loans coming due, and they’re going to have refi them into a higher interest rate environment. So we’re hearing a little bit of chatter that we might see a more active M&A market in the second half of the year.
That said, we don’t sit around at Host and wait for marketed opportunities. We really prefer to continue to work with our long-standing partners relationships that we have and that’s how we got the Nashville deal done. You may recall that we also bought the 1 Hotel South Beach from Starwood Capital. So we’re very happy that Starwood Capital and Crescent have the confidence faith in Host as an owner to give us this deal on an off-market basis. And we’re talking to a lot of other folks out there and I’m hopeful, certainly not assured, but hopeful that over the course of the year that we’ll be able to get additional transactions completed. We’re in a unique position. And we’re going to take advantage of the position that we’re in.
We don’t have to go to the debt capital markets to get a deal done. Even post Nashville, we’re sitting here at 2.3x leverage. We have $1.7 billion of available liquidity. The investment grade balance sheet is very important to us. We certainly intend to maintain our investment-grade rating. That said, with a leverage ratio of circa 3x roughly, we have the ability to acquire another $1.1 billion of assets this year. So that is our focus. We continue to want to elevate the EBITDA growth profile of the portfolio. We told many of you who were at our Investor Day last May, that we’re on track to get to $2 billion of EBITDA and I just encourage everyone to watch us and see what we do.
Operator: Our next question is coming from Smedes Rose with Citi.
Smedes Rose: Sourav, I just wanted to circle back. I know you talked about this a little bit in your opening remarks that the — on a comparable basis, your EBITDA outlook declined by over $20 million. And so you — that included some business insurance. It turned out, it’s going to be a lot more, which is great. But I guess I just wanted to understand, of that about $22 million decline, how much did you think was isolated or sort of realized as it were in the first quarter? And how much is coming through the balance of the year and maybe related to your 1 point reduction in sort of RevPAR forecast?
Sourav Ghosh: Sure thing. I just want to clarify and maybe I’ll just quickly walk through the bridge from our prior guidance to this guidance. Because on the comparable hotel operations, it’s actually a $13 million decline, which is a result of the change of 1 point to our midpoint of going down from the 4% to the 3%. The $13 million, it’s not $22 million, so let’s start off with $1.635 billion, which was our previous guidance. You take out $13 million of comparable operations and which is pretty impressive if you think about it because typically a 1 point decline in RevPAR would equate to $30 million of EBITDA decline. So we’re deducting only $13 million from there. You have $20 million of comparable BI from the Maui wildfires, which you will be adding to that.
Then you take out $10 million for Ventana, maybe that’s where you’re getting the $223 million because the $10 million is moving to non-comp from comps. So that’s Alila Ventana, taking out $10 million of EBITDA. You’re adding $2 million incremental for Naples because our forecast went from $60 million for the year to $62 million. And then you’re adding $29 million for Nashville, the 1 Hotel and the Embassy Suite and then another $8 million of BI for the Ritz, Naples. So that, if you really add that up, you will get to the $1.670 billion. So hopefully, that helps bridge it from our prior guidance. In terms of where that 1 point decline I would say it’s 2/3 in Q1 and about 1/3 in Q2. And as I mentioned earlier, our second half is looking very strong.
So we have a ton of confidence in terms of group for the second half, and that confidence has improved. Our total revenue pace for the second half is now over – slightly over 9%. And a lot of that is Q3 that’s driving it. So – that’s sort of how it lays out. Hopefully, that makes it clear.
Operator: Our next question is coming from Stephen Grambling with Morgan Stanley.
Stephen Grambling: Just a follow-up on that. So there’s a lot of moving parts in terms of bridging that guidance. And some of that includes BI. Some of it is the core, of the BI is covering some of the disruption. What do you think is the kind of right recurring EBITDA in the year to build off of as we think about longer term?
