Alex Cartwright and his crew have checked into the Park Hill Holiday Inn off Quebec Street.
The stay won’t be for leisure: The former economics professor turned real estate investor is planning to convert the 50-year-old hotel into apartments.
“People are going to get A-plus-style amenities, … but they’re not going to pay anything close to A-plus-type apartments,” Cartwright said.
His firm, Dallas, Texas-based HotelShift, purchased the 11-story, 310-key hotel at 3333 Quebec St. last week for $9 million with fellow Texas hotel company Voyage Capital. The duo will carve around 240 apartments out of the existing rooms. Studios will start at $1,100, Cartwright said.
The hotel’s existing gym, pool, handball courts and steam/sauna rooms are all planned to be preserved for future residents. Its restaurant space is expected to be leased to a new tenant, and the firms are looking to add a golf simulator on-site, too. All units will come with a balcony and a full-size fridge, range and dishwasher.
The seller, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based HHM Hotels, purchased the hotel in 2021 for $15.7 million, according to public records. An adjacent office building, which connects to the hotel, is not part of the deal.
Cartwright declined to share his expected construction cost, noting that itap hard to land on an exact number given the complexities with reusing the building.
“There’s so much unknown in the construction, so you have to plan for so many more ‘what-if’ scenarios. … Itap really a question of how many ‘what-if’ scenarios do we want to plan for?” Cartwright said.
“We have spent a lot of time during the due diligence, before we even bought the property, to make sure that our overall project and construction cost is going to be within reason to not only provide a profitable return for us and our investors but keep the basis low enough to be able to provide affordable units to the market,” added Alex Raschke, project manager and construction coordinator for HotelShift.
The Holiday Inn will remain open for at least a few more months while the new owners navigate city permitting and the preconstruction process, Cartwright said. A closing date will be determined by how much demand the hotel experiences; it normally performs well during the summer, he added.
Regardless, Cartwright said hammers will be swinging on the property before the end of the year.
The project will be the third for HotelShift, which focuses exclusively on converting underperforming hotels into apartments. The company was founded in 2024 and has two ongoing projects in Houston, Texas. One is under construction, and the other one is actively leasing, according to Cartwright.
He added that the company has 1,000 units it is looking to start work on in the near future, from Michigan to Georgia to Nevada. The professor, who previously taught at Ferris State University in Michigan, acknowledged Denver’s softening apartment market, where vacancy is at its highest point since 2010.
“We are very bullish on Denver long term,” Cartwright said. “We are not worried about it long term, … we are actively looking for more hotels in the metro area.
“This is the exact time to place a big bet on more affordable apartments in Denver. We are proudly taking the contrarian position.”
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