Accor: a lighter touch - FT.com How light is "asset-light"? Accor, Europe's largest hotel operator measured by number of rooms, wants 80 per cent of its hotels to be franchised or managed - as opposed to owned - by 2015. To get there, it is in permanent restructuring mode. Tuesday's agreement to sell its Motel 6 chain in the US (along with other bits of the economy-class business there) takes the French company a further step towards its target, by shedding owned or fixed-leased properties. The question is whether it is extracting maximum value for investors in pursuing its goal. The headline value of the sale of the US business, to Blackstone, is $1.9bn. Accor will net about a quarter of that in cash; much of the rest is accounted for by, among other things, a €600m loss on buying out the fixed hotel leases. The exit cost from the leases is nearly $5m per lease, or more than twice the cost that Accor incurred by similar sales in 2011, according to Nomura. The US business was struggling, and its sale leaves the group with a net cash position of €100m and its portfolio 76 per cent "asset-light." But the exit cost looks expensive. Accor shares rose 6 per cent after the sale announcement; the shares have offered a total return of 32 per cent to date this year, on a par with Marriott International and a bit more than InterContinental Hotels. Part of its appeal is that it consistently returns cash to shareholders. This time, the proceeds will be reinvested in new hotels: chief executive Denis Hennequin has his eye on expansion in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Europe in luxury and mid-market hotels. In any case, Accor is already paying a special dividend out of its fiscal 2011 results. The company's forward multiple of 20 times earnings appears demanding enough: growth in Europe is hardly a given. The risk for Accor is that it becomes so "asset-light" that its returns begin to float away.