New York’s hotels may be in a depression, but some buyers are betting on an imminent recovery.
Days after acquiring a Financial District hotel from Sam Chang’s McSam Hotel Group for $69 million, Concord Hospitality has offloaded its 21-story hotel building at 30 West 46th Street for $88.5 million, according to public records filed Wednesday. The building most recently housed a 196-key Cambria Hotel, which is now permanently closed.
Concord bought the Times Square-adjacent plot in 2013 from Gary Barnett’s Extell Development for $30 million, building the hotel soon after. The 126,000-square-foot building stands just across 46th Street from a massive Diamond District assemblage pieced together by Extell.
The buyer’s identity remains a mystery. Some documents list the LLC care of Flaherty & O’Hara, a Pittsburgh law firm serving clients in the alcoholic beverage industry. Others point to the firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. The LLC’s signing member is Gregory Weingart, a Pittsburgh attorney who represented anonymous buyers in two other hotel purchases from McSam Hotel Group within the past year.
It’s unclear whether the sales are related. Magna Hospitality Group, who public records reveal was at least one of the previously anonymous McSam buyers, did not return a request for comment.
The property carries a considerable amount of debt. In 2013, Concord took on two mortgages worth $46 million. In 2016, it consolidated the two with a third note, bringing its total debt to $61 million. On the same day it acquired the note, the new buyer assigned the mortgage to KSL Capital Partners, a Denver-based lender that works exclusively with travel and leisure businesses.
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Concord, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, owns hotels in 23 states, Washington D.C., and Canada, according to its website. Weingart declined to comment.