The first owner filed for bankruptcy. The second owner defaulted on a loan.
Now, a long-stalled hotel development near Denver International Airport has a third owner and is coming in with a fresh construction loan.
Voyage Capital, a Dallas-based hotel investor, purchased the partially completed hotel at 16161 E. 40th Ave. late last month for $21.6 million from fellow Texas hospitality firm, Galaxy Hotels Group, according to public records.
Neither firm responded to a request for comment. Voyage financed the deal with a $24 million construction loan from Atlanta-based private equity firm Peachtree Group, records show.
The beleaguered hotel saga dates to 2009, when a firm called WPB Hospitality picked up the lot and subsequently broke ground on a Best Western hotel. Nearly a decade later, WPB was in foreclosure and bankrupt.
A complicated legal battle ensued, with WPB suing a half-dozen companies, accusing them of conspiring to keep the hotel unbuilt in order to acquire the property cheaply through foreclosure. WPB lost the suit, and its main construction financier, American Lending Center, foreclosed on the property in May 2019 for $5.5 million. It sold the site to Galaxy Hotels later that year for $7.5 million, records show.
Galaxy Hotels borrowed $22.7 million to continue construction of the hotel. But just three years after buying it, Galaxy was in default on the loan and a receiver was appointed to manage the building, which was still sitting unfinished.
Peachtree Group, the lender that financed the recent sale of the hotel property, also held the debt for Galaxy, having purchased it in 2022, records show. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.
WPB’s owner, Wanda Bertoia, recently sold another distressed hotel nearby at 6210 N. Tower Road, under the brand Alpine Hospitality.
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