Downtown Baltimore Comfort Inn fails to sell at auction
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The 97-room tower at Lombard and Calvert streets is blocks from the Inner Harbor.
Story Highlights Comfort Inn & Suites failed to sell at auction, reserve not met.
Hotel is vacant due to broken elevators, can't take bookings.
Property was shut down in August 2023 for code violations but reopened.
A well-placed downtown hotel in need of major repairs failed to sell at auction on Wednesday.
The 85,000-square-foot Comfort Inn & Suites at 120 E. Lombard St. did not hit an undisclosed reserve benchmark during an online auction where bidding hit nearly $6 million. The auction was held on the online auction platform Ten-X, which hosted the sale in partnership with Colliers. The 97-room hotel is currently vacant and can't take bookings because of a broken elevator system, the latest struggle for the property in recent years.
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The top bid was $5.95 million, but the Ten-X listing stated "reserve not met," which ultimately denied the sale. The hotel last sold for $8.24 million in 2019.
Colliers broker Matt Gannon did not return a request for comment after the auction closed.
The hotel hit the auction block this spring. It was formerly the three-star Brookshire Suites Inner Harbor, and a Ten-X flyer said new ownership could restore the building back to its glory days, when rooms were 70% booked, mostly with waves of sports fans, convention-goers and tourists.
The hotel was set to be auctioned "as-is," and a Ten-X disclaimer stated that "due to the non-operational elevators, the seller is unable to rent rooms at the property. The buyer acknowledges this limitation and accepts all associated risks." Bidding opened at noon on April 21 with a starting bid of $1.5 million, with bidding increments set at $250,000.
But during the final minutes of the auction, that increment decreased to $100,000 and then $50,000, and more time was added to the auction to accommodate a flurry of bids from an unknown potential buyer or buyers who sought to break through the undisclosed reserve.
The hotel auction came after city inspectors shut down the property in August 2023, due to a rash of code violations that included a lack of operational life safety systems, no primary or emergency power or operational emergency generator and a malfunctioning automatic sprinkler system. The violations were corrected about a month later and the hotel reopened.
The 12-story hotel is owned by Shree Vaishno Devi LLC and BHK Realty LLC, according to state records. The group acquired the property at an auction in September 2019 and rebranded it during the pandemic from the Brookshire Suites to the Comfort Inn.
Prior to that, the hotel had been owned by Modus Hotels, which bought the property for $7.85 million in 2012 and pumped $2.3 million into upgrades with an "urban playground" motif, complete with guests rooms honoring Baltimore-born music legend Frank Zappa and colorful, graffiti-like murals.
The Comfort Inn & Suites sits on a corner within walking distance of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, M&T Bank Stadium, the Baltimore Convention Center and Harborplace, now being reimagined by MCB Real Estate under a $500 million private redevelopment.
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