North dakota hotel opens doors to first tenants

The Great American Lodge in North Dakota has opened its doors to its first tenants this week. The development in Watford City was designed to cater to the surge in demand for worker accommodation since the great oil rush of the Bakken Formation.

With more oil than Saudi Arabia and the UAE combined, the discovery of the amount of recoverable oil in the Bakken rocked global energy markets and set the US on track to become the world's top energy producer by 2017, according to the International Energy Agency. Indeed, since 2011, almost 60,000 energy industry jobs have been created in North Dakota, according to the state’s university.

The Great American Lodge has seen an equally large number of investors seeking to enjoy the yields available from letting out the property to worker, with listings advertising the hotel generating the highest number of enquiries on TheMoveChannel.com in two out of the last five months.

"We quickly identified the issues that other developers were facing, so we came up with a solution that meant our hotel suites could be built fast and to a high standard - we manufactured them off site and then delivered them once built,” comments Robert Gavin, Group CEO of North Dakota Developments LLC.