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The owner must presell nine of 18 lofts to secure financing, but he sees no problem doing that.
By SHARON L. BOND, Neighborhood Times Business Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 15, 2002
ST. PETERSBURG -- Renovation of the Pennsylvania Hotel on Fourth Street N should start again soon, but plans for the rebirth of the 1925 structure have changed to an 18-unit condominium building.
The loft-style condos, to be known as the Pennsylvania, will be priced from $227,300 to $315,000. A second phase involves tearing down the Keystone Club, barbershop, beauty salon and florist shop next door and building a second condominium building.
Developer David Moore, who bought the Pennsylvania from the Bond family in 1999, initially planned to spend $2-million updating it for a specialty hotel. Work started late that year.
"I had signed an agreement with Wyndham," Moore said last week. "After Sept. 11, all financing to do hospitality really disappeared."
Moore said he must presell half of the condominiums before he can secure financing and the rehabilitation can proceed full speed. He said three lenders are interested, but he declined to name them. Moore estimates it will take about $3-million to convert the hotel to condominiums.
With Smith & Associates, Moore plans an announcement event from 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at 330 Beach Drive NE. Next weekend he will conduct tours by appointment.
What prospective buyers will see is a construction site with some new wall board on outer walls and many interior walls partly knocked down. Moore thinks the large number of 3- by 6-foot windows that each unit has will be one of the main selling points. He plans open living/dining areas.
The seven-floor, 130-room hotel at 300 Fourth St. N, will have three units per level on the second through the seventh floors. Plans call for two bedrooms and two bathrooms in each condominium.
The ground floor will have two entrances for residents, a cafe and other retail shops but no residences. Moore is preserving original tile, marble and brass fixtures and restoring as much of the holding as possible. Some of the old hotel room doors carry brass plaques with requests for guests to conserve energy, apparently added during World War II.
The Pennsylvania, the last seasonal hotel in St. Petersburg, has one of the few basements in the city. That area will be used for individual wine cellers for each unit, Moore said. An outdoor area will be built on the roof for residents to use.
Moore said that even though the economy is not at its most robust now, the condominiums should sell because of their location in a historic building in a downtown that continues a resurgence that began in the latter half of the 1990s.
"The units are in a price range below what typically is on the market right now," said Moore, referring to the three luxury high-rise condominium buildings that opened downtown in the last few years. Some of those units had price tags into the millions.
"There are a lot of people disenchanted with the stock market who are investing in real estate," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised if we had some of those buyers as well."