Hotel Owner Pushed Out of Two Times Square Properties

A Long Island investor who leaned on pandemic-era stopgaps to keep Midtown hotels afloat has now lost both properties.

Paramdeep Singh, who owns gas stations and operated the hotels through Premier Hotels, was stripped of control at 59 West 46th Street and 129 West 46th Street after defaults, foreclosure actions and investor infighting, Crain’s reported.

At 59 West 46th Street, a nine-story, 234-room hotel just off Sixth Avenue, Singh was undone by a former partner-turned-lender. Boris Aronov, a cab driver who later became a Diamond District diamond dealer, acquired the building’s distressed mortgage last summer and then moved to foreclose when Singh failed to repay the debt by the end of the year. Court filings show the obligation had swelled to $57 million.

The deed, recorded last week, pegs the property’s value at roughly $53 million, below the $59.5 million Singh’s group paid for the hotel in 2022 when it bought it from Apple Core. That acquisition was heavily leveraged with more than $32 million in debt.

Once a budget-brand flag, the hotel more recently functioned as supportive housing under a nonprofit lease that is expected to remain in place.

Aronov is also eyeing a different future for part of the building: the property spans through to 47th Street, where he plans to bring in diamond merchants, extending his jewelry-focused portfolio in the neighborhood.

Singh tried to stop the takeover in court, accusing Aronov of bad-faith tactics and arguing that international trade policies — Donald Trump’s tariffs — scuttled a last-minute refinancing. The effort failed.

A few doors east, Singh’s grip recently loosened at 129 West 46th Street, a 79-room prewar hotel he bought in 2019 for $24 million. When tourism collapsed, Singh pivoted the building into a city-contracted migrant shelter, generating steady cash flow but complicating long-term repositioning.

A planned revival with hotel operator LuxUrban fizzled and the operator’s bankruptcy cleared the way for foreclosure. A judge entered a $21.6 million judgment last fall and the property sold at auction this month to bridge lender W Financial for $23.8 million.

Investor lawsuits accusing Singh of mismanagement and opaque finances added pressure behind the scenes. Singh did not comment on the loss of the hotels.

— Holden Walter-Warner