The new owners of the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel took care of one important detail today when the city’s liquor board approved a request to transfer the property’s Class “B” Beer, Wine & Liquor hotel-motel license to them.
With little discussion, the liquor board voted 3 to 0 to transfer the license for the 622-room hotel at 200-202 E. Pratt Street to David Pollin, Joseph Bojanowski and Patricia Yevice-Eisenberg of Baltimore Hotel XLV Owner LLC, the hotel’s owner as of July.
The hotel occupies the middle floors of the mixed-use building that includes the Gallery at Harborplace shopping center and the office tower at 111 South Calvert Street. Renaissance is luxury brand of Marriott International that was founded in 1981 as Ramada Renaissance and acquired by Marriott in 1997.
The new owner is an affiliate of the Buccini/Pollin Group, a real estate firm that has 17 other Marriott-affiliated hotels, including the Renaissance Philadelphia Downtown hotel. The seller was Sunstone Hotel Investors of Irvine, California. The sale price was $80 million, or about $129,000 per key.
Designed by the Zeidler Roberts Partnership, the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel last sold in 2005 for $157 million. According to The Wall Street Journal, the buyer had planned to purchase the hotel for $100 million before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Sunstone agreed to drop the price.
The hotel has three food and beverage outlets and a fifth-floor restaurant called Watertable, as well as a fitness center, a business center and nearly 30,000 square feet of meeting and event space. Sunstone completed a multi-million-dollar renovation last year.
Formed in 1993, the Buccini/Pollin Group is a privately-held, full-service real estate acquisition, development and management company with offices in Chevy Chase, Maryland; Wilmington, Del., and Philadelphia, Pa.
Buccini/Pollin will work in Baltimore with the PM Hotel Group, a company that is headed by Bojanowski and manages nearly 50 hotels containing more than 9,000 rooms across the United States.
The property will remain a Renaissance hotel. An attorney for the applicants told the liquor board that the hotel’s operations are not changing as a result of the transfer of license. As part of the transfer, the liquor board permitted the new owners to continue offering live entertainment within the building and table service outside.
Pollin said in a statement earlier this year that the Buccini/Pollin Group likes the Renaissance brand because it caters to both business and leisure travelers. “We are very proud to be expanding our commitment to Baltimore, a city on the rise,” he said.
