Markeshia Ricks file photo
Former owner Salas-Romer (center) at 2016 ribbon cutting: Village Suites sold, apartments to come.
A Brooklyn-based landlord has purchased a 112-room extended-stay hotel on Long Wharf for $15 million — and plans to convert the property into apartments.
According to a warranty deed posted to the city’s land records database on Dec. 11, New Haven Villages LLC paid Village Suites LLC $15 million to buy the Village Suites hotel properties at 3 Long Wharf Dr., 169 Hallock Ave., 173 Hallock Ave., and 175 Hallock Ave. The city last appraised those properties for tax purposes as worth just under $7 million.
The 14-building, 112-room hotel has been owned and run since 2016 by a company controlled by local landlord Juan Salas-Romer. (After operating on a“land lease” arrangement for half a decade, Salas-Romer’s company bought the Long Wharf Drive property’s underlying land for over $1.7 million in 2021.)
In 2022, Salas-Romer’s company won city zoning approval that would allow for a conversion of the extended-stay hotel into a multifamily rental property.
And that’s exactly what the new owner, Ahron Rudich of Brooklyn, plans to do.
“It’s already apartments,” with kitchens and all the rest, Rudich said about the existing hotel’s setup. “We would like to turn it into multifamily.” He said he’s still working through the details of when and how that hotel-to-apartments conversion will take place, including the final unit count for what is now a 112-room hotel.
But, he stressed, “we know we’d like to turn it into multifamily.”
“I’ll go anywhere where the deal is,” he added, when asked why he decided to buy this property and enter the New Haven real estate market, as he already owns other apartment complexes in Stamford and Wethersfield. “We think there’s a tremendous amount of money to be made by turning it into multifamily.”
Salas-Romer said that his company decided to sell for a simple reason: “Just economics, I guess.”
He said he’d been looking for the right buyer that would follow through on city-approved zoning allowing for this hotel to be turned into apartments. “We found a buyer-developer that wants to do some redevelopment, some renovation, and renting as a multifamily property. We found the right buyer.”
He described the hotel as currently in a “transition phase” from hotel to apartments. Rudich said that there are “a lot of bookings that we still have to honor” before following through on the multifamily conversion.
Salas-Romer noted that the “extended-stay hotel” model refers to stays that are five days or more. A short-term rental in a multifamily apartment complex, meanwhile, would be as short as six months. “Anywhere between five days and six months, you have a gap there,” he said. Thus the need for extended-stay hotels — to provide space for people displaced from their homes or otherwise in need of a mid-term length of stay.
That said, this property is now en route to becoming multifamily apartments. And, Salas-Romer said, his company is now looking for new real estate investment opportunities in New Haven.
“We’re looking for new projects to get involved in.” He added that “macroeconomic factors right now” make it a challenging market to buy and build in. “You have high interest rates and high prices. It’s an odd market,” he said.