Just weeks after two Charleston hotels were sold at a foreclosure sale, the group that managed the hotels before the foreclosure has bought them and plans to complete a multimillion-dollar renovation project this year.
Steven Senft, a principal with California-based CRU Real Estate Group, announced plans to upgrade the Charleston Capitol and Best Western hotels during the Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau board meeting Wednesday.
The upgrades Senft outlined for the hotels, located in the 1000 block of Washington Street East, were myriad.
Charleston Capitol will be rebranded as a four-star, full-service Wyndham Garden hotel, Senft said.
"We'll be putting in pillowtop mattresses, triple sheeting, new furniture and pretty much gutting the guest rooms, bathrooms, everything," Senft said.
Flat-screen televisions will be installed in every room, and the firm has already increased wireless Internet access, he said. A restaurant and bar will be added to the first floor of Charleston Capitol.
A roughly 3,300-square foot ballroom in the basement that was once a feature of the former Heart O' Town Hotel will be renovated and used for event space, he said.
"There's not anything in the hotel that won't be touched," Senft said.
The hotels were previously owned by Silver Creek Charleston A and Silver Creek Charleston B LLCs.
After the Silver Creek groups defaulted on the mortgage payments to their lender, the State Bank of Texas, the bank purchased the hotels at a trustees sale on April 21.
Sometime in the last month, CRU Real Estate Group entered into a contract with that bank and took ownership of the hotels.
Senft said CRU has managed day-to-day operations at the hotels since last year as the ownership group tried to mitigate its financial issues.
"We were running the properties for [Silver Creek] while they tried to work something out with the bank."
Calls made to the State Bank of Texas were not returned Wednesday.
The city has not received hotel taxes from either hotel since November, Charleston City Attorney Paul Ellis said.
"Consumers staying in a hotel owe a small tax to the city ... the hotel collects and remits [taxes] to the city on a monthly basis. It's not the hotel's money," Ellis said. "They stopped remitting that tax to the city sometime back in November."
The CVB, which receives at least 50 percent of hotel tax revenues, reported a $27,000 deficit from that source of income between July and March, compared to the last fiscal year's numbers.
Senft said CRU isn't responsible for the taxes Silver Creek failed to remit when it owned the hotels. "The [former] ownership group is responsible for something like that. We'll be reporting taxes on a consistent basis," he said.
Senft wouldn't say how much CRU paid for the hotels.
He estimates that the renovations will be completed before the end of this year, and confirmed that both hotels will remain operating while work is underway.
Also Wednesday, the CVB board received an uplifting report from the owner of Autopods, the three-wheeled pedicabs that first hit Charleston's streets on May 7.
Since then, they have given more than 400 rides, owner Tanuj Apte said. That's roughly 37 rides per day on average between the two Autopods.
"We actually had to ignore 87 rides because we don't have enough cars, [so] we're thinking of getting a third in Charleston by the end of the month," Apte said. "A lot of advertising clients [are] lined up."
But Apte is already thinking about how Autopods can bring manufacturing jobs to the Mountain State.
"We're meeting with a carbon-fiber manufacturer this week who will help us redesign the body of our cars. They're currently made of fiberglass, and this puts on a lot of additional weight," he said.
The company is also beginning to train drivers and hire managers who will oversee operations once Apte heads back to Pittsburgh.
"We want to use the resources we have in West Virginia and Charleston to start beta testing on how to identify smaller cities in U.S. that we can scale to," Apte said.
Also Wednesday, Mayor Danny Jones presented the Convention and Visitors Bureau Mayor's Choice Award to Marine Corps veteran Hershel "Woody" Williams on Wednesday for his contributions to the city's tourism efforts.
Reach Elaina Sauber at elaina.sauber@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-3051 or follow @ElainaSauber on Twitter.