MENLO PARK — An upscale Menlo Park hotel whose owners had defaulted on a property loan has been seized through foreclosure of its loan, a grim new entry in the catalog of lodging industry woes during the coronavirus era.
Park James Hotel, located at 1400 El Camino Real near downtown Menlo Park, is now owned by an affiliate of a Midwest firm whose specialties include the purchase of delinquent property loans, according to documents filed on Feb. 4 with San Mateo County officials.
The hotel’s owners had become delinquent on a loan issued in 2019 by Employees Retirement Plan of Consolidated Electrical Distributors Inc., county public records show.
The financing for the hotel totaled $32 million, according to county property documents.
The loan went into default in September 2020 — less than a year when the financing was provided in December 2019, an unusually short period of time for commercial property financing to become delinquent.
PJ Hotel, an affiliate of Illinois-based Bixby Bridge Capital, now owns the hotel, the county records show.
Once the hotel’s finances are stabilized, it’s poised for success as the lodging sector rebounds from a brutal 12 months of coronavirus-linked setbacks.
“The Park James is a new high-end luxury boutique hotel, located in the heart of Silicon Valley,” said Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group, which tracks the lodging market in California. “It is positioned to do very well in the long term as the market recovers from COVID and business travel picks back up.”
The ownership entity that defaulted on the property loan is an affiliate whose managers are Bay Area business executives James Pollock and Jeffrey Pollock, county and state documents show.
James Pollock is the chief executive officer and Jeffrey Pollock is a vice president with Portola Valley-based Pollock Financial Group.
The Park James Hotel was constructed in 2017, and opened in 2018 by its developer and principal owner, according to county and state business records.
The Bay Area leisure and hospitality sector was among the hardest hit by layoffs. Restaurants, hotels, drinking establishments and entertainment and arts centers lost 195,400 jobs over the one-year period that ended in February — a jaw-dropping 45% of all the jobs lost in the Bay Area over those 12 months.
The Park James Hotel is located a short distance from the headquarters of Facebook and Google and is near Stanford University.
The hotel features a dining facility called Oak + Violet Restaurant and in-room iPads.
When the Park James hotel opened in 2018, it received rave reviews from guests and professional observers alike.
“The 61-room boutique property has a lot going for it, introducing a ton of unexpected amenities meant to impress its tech-savvy clientele, all of whom will likely be staying on business,” the Robb Report wrote in late 2018.
