Hunt Valley’s Quality Suites hotel has changed hands to an investment group headed by Pikesville-based developer Blue Ocean, which is planning to convert it into apartments.

The 96-room extended-stay property at 10710 Beaver Dam Road just offInterstate 83 was recently acquired for $7 million by a subsidiary of BlueOcean and a subsidiary of theBethesda-based investment groupWalker & Dunlop, Inc., Walker &Dunlop Investment Partners that is based in Denver.

The group is planning to convert the hotel rooms into one and two-bedroom apartments in the coming year for a total redevelopment cost of $13 million, Blue Ocean’s Jonathan Ehrenfeld said Friday.

Quality Suites hotel sits less than a mile from Hunt Valley TowneCentre and the light rail station. It is the latest sale of a property in the northern Baltimore County corridor where several blue-chip businesses like spice giant McCormick & Co., Paypal, SinclairBroadcast Group, Bank of America and GEICO have headquarters and local offices. The hotel has been a part of the Rockville-basedChoice Hotels International (NYSE: CHH) chain.

The seller was Northeast Investment Group LLC, state records show. The two-story Hunt Valley hotel first opened 33 years ago. Plans by the new owners to convert it into a multi-family development will include upgrades and renovations like new kitchens and bathrooms. The property’s common areas and exterior landscaping will also get a gussy up.

“This is a great candidate for conversion thanks to its location in an affluent, job-dense micro-market in Baltimore County,” said Sam Isaacson, Walker & Dunlop’s president, in a statement. “The garden-style building was constructed in 1988 and has been unrenovated for over a decade and has multifamily-quality floor plans where a capital improvement program will have a high impact.”

Blue Ocean CEO Jonathan Ehrenfeld said the deal was off-market, and that the sale averaged about $73,000 per unit, a price he deemed “well below the average per-unit price for both extended stay assets and multifamily assets.” The location next door to the public Beaver Dam Swim Club was also a plus in the deal, he added.

The 17-year-old Blue Ocean company portfolio includes 3,000multifamily units as well as industrial, hospitality, retail, office, self-storage properties that total more than 3 million square feet. The firm is in the midst of renovating a 2 million-square-foot former airplane plant in Middle River and converting it into AviationStation, a youth and adult amateur sports-based complex.

Branching out into Hunt Valley with the acquisition was seen as a natural next move, Ehrenfeld said.

“This is a great opportunity in an exceptional location to create value with thoughtful upgrades,” he said, in a statement.

From the Baltimore Business Journal:
https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2021/08/27/hunt-valley-hotel-blue-ocean-apartments.html

Author:
Melody Simmons
Reporter
Baltimore Business Journal