WG Mitchell, owned by the Hegarty family from Derry, also plans to spend up to £200m to acquire more hotels in the British market.

The firm has paid £75m to buy a Novotel in London, and the purchase of the Radisson hotel in Glasgow's Argyll Street and The Quay Leisure Centre in Glasgow brought the total spend to £190m.

WG Mitchell, run by Patrick Hegarty from his Edinburgh headquarters, has a £500m property portfolio with assets mainly located in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

"In the last two years we've gone from a mixed retail and industrial portfolio to concentrate more on hotels, " Hegarty said. "We're very very happy with the latest deals. We've got properties in two great locations."

The company paid £52.5m for the 247-bedroom Glasgow Radisson hotel, one of only two five-star hotels in the city centre. It is Glasgow's bestperforming hotel in terms of average weekly room rates.

Hegarty said WG Mitchell had made its first property investment in Scotland in Cumbernauld around nine years ago, and is keen to do more in the hotel sector.

"The hotel market in the UK has really come to life.

We've got about 20 hotels in the UK now and we're looking to buy more. We could spend another £150m to £200m."

WG Mitchell also recently bought The Quay, a 15-and-ahalf-acre leisure and entertainment complex on the Clydeside for £61.5m from Heron Corporation, a property company headed by Gerald Ronson. The Quay site spans 125,000 square feet and includes a cinema complex, nightclub, restaurants and car park. The complex will double to 250,000 square feet, with the addition of five new restaurants, a 160-bedroom hotel let to Accor and a multistorey car park, significantly increasing its value.

The company, which also owns The Point hotel in Edinburgh, paid £105m last year to acquire a Radisson hotel in Edinburgh and a hotel in London's docklands. WG Mitchell is also involved in a £100m property joint venture with the property arm of AWG which has struck over £60m worth of deals since it was launched last February.

WG Mitchell was founded by Hugh Hegarty and is now run by his son Patrick. The family, who originally ran a chain of butchers in Derry, began investing in property in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and continued to build up their portfolio during the Troubles, when outside property investors shunned the North.