We achieved this goal as we now have 37 of our 39 wholly owned hotels open and operational with the two remaining closed hotels under contract for sale.
Of the 28 comparable hotels that were open throughout the third quarter, 21 of these hotels broke even on the GOP line with nine achieving EBITDA breakeven levels.
Our Sanctuary Beach Resort was the best performing asset again during the third quarter, ending the period at 81% occupancy with a $570 ADR, which led to 16% RevPAR growth.
Success continued in October, despite worries that leisure travel would subside after Labor Day as the resort grew RevPAR by 22% aided by 55% ADR growth and 70% occupancy.
Down the California coast, the hotel Milo in Santa Barbara continued its momentum from the second quarter and finished the summer on a strong note with third quarter ADR in line with last year, aided by a very strong September, which saw 70% occupancy and 11% ADR growth.
We have been able to win market share and saw an occupancy bump of 1500 basis points versus August for our South Florida portfolio and that momentum continued into October, as our portfolio occupancy grew another 500 basis points for the month.
Rates around the holiday week between Christmas and New Year's are already in line with last year and with a strong 30% occupancy already on the books across our South Florida portfolio, we believe demand will continue to pick up as we move through the holiday season.
Pre-COVID our resorts portfolio, all the drive-to from one of our gateway market clusters contributed 25% of our EBITDA.
75% of our portfolio remains gateway urban markets.
During President Obama's second inauguration in 2013, our portfolio generated 23% RevPAR growth during the quarter.
In the first quarter of 2017, following President Trump's inauguration, our portfolio RevPAR grew by 15% with 57% growth on the night of the inauguration.
20% of New York's total hotel room count, about 25,000 keys could permanently close and every week we seem to be seeing this forecast come to fruition with another permanent closure.
Industry experts believe this could equate to more than 13,000 rooms.
Year-to-date through September, 211 projects in the US representing 56% decrease in the pipeline over the same period last year.
These are staggering figures that could continue to increase as our industry works through the recovery and even mirror the great financial crisis when the supply pipeline declined from a peak of 212,000 rooms at the end of 2007 to 50,000 rooms in early 2011.
As a quick reminder we have announced accretive binding sales agreements on four assets in our portfolio with total expected net proceeds of $70 million.
New Castle County of Delaware is acquiring the hotel for an additional $19.5 million in proceeds.
This is about a 2% cap on 2019.
These first five transactions are all smaller, non-core hotels and we are pleased with the pricing within 10% to 20% of pre-COVID values and at a combined 21 times EBITDA multiple on 2019.
Across the last 90 days, even before the election or the vaccine, there has been a meaningful improvement in the availability of debt for higher quality, lower cash burn hotels.
Due to our focused service strategy we were able to comfortably restart our hotels with the confidence that we can attain GOP breakeven levels within 45 days of reopening.
During July, 21 of our 28 open hotels broke even on the GOP line.
This increased to 22 hotels in August and 25 hotels in September.
Once again during July, nine of our 28 open hotels achieved break-even EBITDA levels which increased to 11 hotels in August and 16 in September.
Our model allows us the flexibility to continue to operate our hotels at current staffing levels at our break-even occupancies approximating 35% all the way up to 55% and even 60% at some of our hotels.
With our open portfolio generating 37% occupancy in the third quarter, we estimate that revenue from the next 20 percentage points of occupancy gains should drop down to the GOP line at 75% to 80% flow-through, generating outsized margin gains and highlighting the operating leverage inherent in our portfolio.
We estimate that many of these changes will lead to a 10% reduction in housekeeping labor and our preoccupied room cost for items such as breakfast and in-room amenities.
As an example, we currently maintain an average FTE count at our hotels of 21 employees versus 60 FTEs in February of 2020.
Employee counts will increase as occupancies rise but changes in our operating model should allow for additional labor cost reductions in the 5% to 8% range leading to sustainable margin expansion of 150 basis points to 200 basis points post-pandemic.
Our property level cash burn ended the second quarter at $3.4 million and decreased sequentially over the balance of the third quarter with a $2.5 million cash loss on property in July and ending September with a $1.7 million property level cash loss.
This brought total property level cash burn for the third quarter to $5.7 million, 25% below our forecast at the beginning of the period.
At the beginning of the pandemic, our corporate level cash burn which includes all hotel operating expenses, corporate SG&A and debt service was originally projected to be $11 million per month.
Our corporate level burn rate steadily declined over the six-month period ending in September reducing from $10.5 million for April to $6.6 million for July and ending the third quarter with a $5.9 million burn rate in September.
Our corporate cash burn for the third quarter totaled $18.2 million, 32% below our second quarter burn rate and 27% below our initial downside scenario forecast.
Based on this quarter's results and our forecast for the fourth quarter, we are comfortable that on a property level basis our entire portfolio breaks-even with a 65% RevPAR decline with occupancies approaching 35% to 40% and a 25% to 30% ADR decrease.
At the corporate level, our RevPAR breakeven occurs at a 45% RevPAR decline factoring in 55% to 60% occupancies at a 20% ADR discount.
During the fourth quarter, we expect to collect insurance proceeds between $7 million and $8 million which will be recorded in our fourth quarter results.
During the third quarter we spent $5.4 million on capital projects bringing our year-to-date spend to $21.8 million.
We anticipate a significantly reduced capex load for 2021, primarily focused on maintenance capex and life safety renovation, roughly 40% below our 2020 spend.
Since 2017, we've allocated close to $200 million for product upgrades and ROI generating capital projects across more than 50% of our total room count.
As of November 1, we've drawn $126 million of our $250 million senior credit facility and ended the quarter with $20.2 million in cash and deposits.
We remain in constant contact with suppliers of the four assets that we announced earlier this year and we recently granted the buyer of the Dwayne Street hotel an extension before in the first quarter of 2021 and this resulted in our receipt of an additional deposit of $500,000 for the transaction.
Over the past week we went under contract for sale for the Sheraton Wilmington in Delaware for $19.5 million and we've received a material hard deposit from the buyer.
We anticipate this sale will close before the end of 2020.
As we enter the final months of this unprecedented year for our company and our industry, we look toward our pillars of strength to navigate our passport, our unique owner operator relationship which has yielded significant expense savings over the past nine months, our cluster strategy which maximizes revenues and economies of scale while capturing unique demand opportunities in our market and the more than 20 years of experience in the public markets as a team for Jay, Neil and I. All the while we continue to explore various opportunities to fortify our balance sheet, to give the portfolio extensive runway as we navigate toward stabilized demand over the next several years.

Summary:
We anticipate this sale will close before the end of 2020.