Lightstone: how much of the Moxy value is actually accessible after minorities and secured debt

What This Follow-up Is Isolating

The main article argued that the hotels are now large enough to move the overall read on Lightstone. This follow-up isolates the gap between two numbers that look similar but belong to very different layers: Moxy hotel value on a 100% basis, versus what remains for Lightstone after minorities and the secured funding stack.

That gap is not technical noise. The year-end appraisals put Moxy Chelsea at $322 million and Moxy Times Square at $477 million as of December 31, 2025, for a combined $799 million. But Lightstone owns only 90% of the economics in Chelsea and 89.526% of the economics in Times Square. At the same time, the full rights in each hotel are pledged to the secured bondholders, and there is still EB-5 financing outstanding of $24 million in Chelsea and $31.5 million in Times Square.

That is the core point here: the hotels created value, but most of that value still sits first inside the collateral stack. Anyone stopping at gross hotel value or gross hotel EBITDA could read Moxy as near-clean NAV. That is the wrong public-company bridge.

On a par-balance basis, roughly 73% of the combined hotel value is already occupied by secured debt and EB-5 financing. After minorities, Lightstone is left with about $191.9 million, only about 24% of the $799 million gross appraisal figure. Even that is still before unsecured debt, corporate overhead, taxes, and other group-level uses of capital.

This bridge is not especially harsh. If the analysis uses the carrying values of Series D and V rather than par balances, the amount left for Lightstone falls from roughly $191.9 million to about $181.8 million. So even on a friendlier reading, the accessible number remains far below what the appraisal headline alone suggests.

Why The Number Looks Bigger on First Read

This is where the main reading trap sits. In the hotel appendices as of December 31, 2025, Chelsea shows $334.5 million of equity in the hotel entity and Times Square shows $492.2 million. A reader stopping there could come away thinking there is more than $826 million of hotel equity sitting inside Moxy.

That is wrong. Those schedules mainly reflect the fact that the old senior and mezzanine hotel loans were repaid from the bond issuance proceeds, leaving the hotel entities themselves with the asset, cash, receivables, and relatively small current liabilities. But above those entities sits a public bond layer secured by the full rights in the hotels. So equity inside the property entities is not the same thing as accessible value at the public-company layer.

That also explains why the disclosed LTV covenant readings on Series D and V do not tell the full story on their own. The company shows 63.3% LTV on Series D and 67.8% on Series V at year-end 2025. But those are bond-level readings. Once the remaining EB-5 balances are added back in, the simple claim on gross hotel value rises to about 70.7% on Chelsea and 74.9% on Times Square. In other words, most of the Moxy value is still working first for the debt stack.

That is why the hotels matter more to collateral quality than to free NAV. If the hotels appreciate further, the first benefit is stronger cushion for the secured and unsecured credit stack. Only after the excess over debt widens sufficiently does that start to become meaningful clean equity optionality.

From Hotel EBITDA to What Actually Reaches the Public Layer

The same distortion exists on the operating side. The hotel tables show EBITDA of $21.678 million for Chelsea and $29.570 million for Times Square for the periods included in Lightstone's 2025 results, together $51.248 million. That number is real, but again it is a 100% number.

After Lightstone's economic share, attributable hotel EBITDA drops to about $19.5 million in Chelsea and about $26.5 million in Times Square, together roughly $46.0 million. That is already a better public-layer number. But even there, stopping is too early.

Using the year-end balances and the stated interest rates on the secured funding stack produces a simple annual financing layer of about $12.0 million on Series D, about $18.0 million on Series V, about $1.7 million on Chelsea EB-5, and about $1.7 million on Times Square EB-5. Together that is about $33.4 million a year, before principal, tax, and corporate overhead.

The implication is straightforward. Even if the reader accepts the hotel EBITDA at face value, what remains after minorities and after the secured funding layer is only about $12.6 million on a simple annualized basis, before corporate overhead, before unsecured debt, and before principal repayments. That is still meaningful, but it already looks much more like credit cushion with upside than like EBITDA that rolls almost fully into the public-company layer.

It is important to label this correctly. This is not a calculation of the exact hotel finance expense booked during 2025. It is a simple year-end run-rate bridge using disclosed balances and stated rates. That is precisely why it is useful here: it shows what the hotels need to carry structurally before the public layer can treat the economics as truly open.

What This Means for Lightstone Now

The conclusion is not that the hotels are weaker than they look. Quite the opposite. Chelsea and Times Square are real assets, with average occupancy of 94% and 92% in 2025 and year-end values of $322 million and $477 million. They also help explain why Lightstone now reads as a deeper asset platform and as a debt issuer whose collateral story is materially stronger than it was before.

But the right reading is that the hotels improve Lightstone first through coverage quality, and only after that through free equity value. That distinction matters especially in a bond-only issuer. The local public does not hold a listed equity here, so the relevant question is not how much Moxy is worth on paper, but how much of that value still remains after minorities, pledges, and financing that must be serviced.

On that reading, Moxy is not $799 million of freely available value. It is about $191.9 million at the hotel layer on a par-balance basis, or about $181.8 million if the carrying values of the secured bonds are used, and that is still before additional group liabilities. So the hotels do change the Lightstone story, but not in the simple way implied by the gross appraisal figures.

That also explains why any NAV discussion on Lightstone has to pass through two filters. The first is the rights filter: how much of the asset the company actually owns economically. The second is the accessibility filter: how much of that value is already occupied by secured claims. Skip either filter and the result may be impressive, but it is not useful.

Conclusion

Lightstone's hotels are already large enough to affect the whole company read. But that effect is primarily credit and structure, not pure equity uplift. On a year-end 2025 bridge, somewhat less than a quarter of the gross Moxy value remains for Lightstone at the hotel layer after secured debt and minorities.

The thesis of this continuation in one line: Moxy marked a step change in Lightstone's asset quality, but the value that is actually accessible to the public-company layer is far smaller than the 100% appraisal number, so the hotels should be read first as improved coverage with upside, not as $799 million of free NAV.