265-room Connecticut hotel up for auction

The owners of a hotel in Norwalk, Connecticut, tried  to sell it in 2019 for $19 million and got no takers. One pandemic later, they’re setting their sights a bit lower.

A lot lower, actually.

The DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Norwalk is scheduled to go to auction during the first week of April, CT Insider reported. The minimum bid is $4 million.

The city last appraised the property at $12.5 million and estimated its replacement cost at $18 million.

The hotel, at 789 Connecticut Avenue, is half a century old and has 265 rooms across eight floors. It’s on a three-acre parcel near Interstate 95.

Rooms are available for $155 per night, according to Booking.com, which happens to be headquartered opposite the hotel in a building purchased prior to the pandemic by New York-based investor Kamran Hakim.

Ownership of the struggling hotel, which is obscured by a limited liability company, is being represented by Paramount Lodging Advisors. The LLC is managed by Mount Street, a special servicer of loans. A judge in 2018 approved a foreclosure of the hotel after debtholders sued ownership, which was more than $20 million in default.

Other DoubleTree locations in Connecticut include Windsor Locks and Bristol, and a traditional Hilton in Hartford is being converted into a DoubleTree with both hotel rooms and apartments.

The Hilton Garden Inn also has a Norwalk location, on Main Avenue.

The hotel industry has mostly recovered from the pandemic, although business travel has not come all the way back and perhaps never will. That has contributed to lower sale prices for hotels.

At the end of 2021, Beverly Hills-based Hawkins Way Capital purchased the site of a former Midtown DoubleTree in Manhattan for $146 million. That was less than half what RLJ Lodging Trust paid for it a decade earlier.

— Holden Walter-Warner