Marylebone Warwick Balfour (MWB), the quoted property company, has started to sound out potential purchasers of Malmaison and Hotel du Vin, its boutique hotel chains - for the third time in 18 months - with a combined asking price of more than £650 million.

The Times understands that Bank of America, which was first appointed by MWB to advise on a sale just over a year ago, has quietly started to recontact interested parties in recent weeks, although it is canvassing interest in the two brands separately rather than as a single package.

Industry sources claim that MWB is looking for about £350 million for the Malmaison chain and at least £300 million for Hotel du Vin. However, analysts said that the mooted asking prices, although lower than the £700 million that it was looking for last year for the combined business, were still too high given the economic outlook.

One factor in MWB's favour is that both brands have expanded rapidly since they were taken off the market in September because of the credit crunch. In November it will open its twelfth Malmaison, in Aberdeen, while Hotel du Vin has three more openings in the pipeline over the next four months - in Poole, Dorset, in Newcastle and in Edinburgh - that will take the total to fourteen.

It has also recently acquired properties in Canterbury and St Andrews for conversion to the Hotel du Vin concept and has said that it expects to have 14 Malmaisons and 18 Hotel du Vin properties by 2010.

MWB is hoping that it will be third time lucky as it seeks to sell the hotel businesses. In June last year, a deal to sell the underlying assets to Vector Hospitality, a real estate investment trust, fell through when a lack of investor appetite and property market jitters forced Vector to scrap a proposed £2 billion flotation.

MWB subsequently appointed Bank of America to sell the whole business outright, eliciting interest from investors including Quinlan Private, R20, Lydian Capital and Permira.

There were rumours that Marriott International, the American hotel operator, was close to agreeing a deal at the £700 million asking price, only for Bill Marriott, the company's chairman and chief executive, to change his mind at the eleventh hour.

In April, MWB said that as a result of the credit crunch it had put back its self-imposed deadline for selling the assets and returning the cash to shareholders by two years to December 2010. In addition to hotels, it owns 68 per cent of Liberty, the department store, and Business Exchange, the serviced offices provider.

The latest decision to resurrect attempts to sell the hotels, particularly at the mooted prices, when debt funding has all but dried up will surprise many observers, although some believe that the strong roll-out potential of both brands - Malmaison is aimed at the corporate market, while Hotel du Vin targets leisure travellers - supports a premium price. Both chains have also proved resilient to the consumer spending downturn, with room occupancy and rates both slightly up on last year, although MWB recently reported some drop-off in spending on food and drink in its bars and restaurants.

Robert Cook, the chief executive of MWB's hotel interests, has expressed a desire to expand the Malmaison brand overseas, citing locations including the Baltic states and the Middle East, where the development of boutique hotels is in its infancy.

One analyst pointed to the bidding battle for Morgans Hotel Group, the Nasdaq-listed boutique hotel operator, as a pointer to what might happen to MWB's hotels. Morgans is being pursued by two soveriegn wealth funds - Zabeel, a Dubai-based fund, and Mubadala, an investment and development arm of the Abu Dhabi Government.

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