The Holiday Inn at 3333 Quebec St. was built in 1973, according to property records. (Thomas Gounley/BusinessDen)
Alex Cartwright thinks a 50-year-old Holiday Inn on the edge of where Denver’s Stapleton Airport once stood deserves a second shot at life.
“Nobody mismanaged anything,” he said. “The market has shifted. The architecture is old. I mean, after all, the airport moved. It’s not like that happens every day. So the highest and best use is no longer hospitality for this site.”
Cartwright’s Dallas, Texas-based firm HotelShift, which specializes in converting hotels into apartments, expects to go under contract this week to buy the 11-story, 310-room hotel at 3333 Quebec St.
He’s teaming up with fellow Dallas hotel company Voyage Capital to turn it into 220 to 240 apartments. Plans were submitted to Denver last month.
An adjacent office building, which connects to the hotel, is not part of the deal, Cartwright said. Philadelphia-based HHM Hotels purchased the property in 2021 for $15.7 million, according to public records.
“We came across this just through a network of hospitality brokers that we developed a relationship with,” Cartwright said. “And we like this property because of the large room sizes, and there are balconies on every room.”
Alex Cartwright
The hotel’s existing gym, ample meeting space, pool, handball courts and steam/sauna rooms would all be preserved for future residents. Its restaurant is being eyed for conversion into a sports bar, and the firms are looking to add a golf simulator on-site as well.
An atrium in the core of the square brown building presents some challenges, said Jai Desai, CEO of Voyage Capital, the firm partnering with Cartwright’s on the deal. He’s planning to wall it off with glass barriers to save on utilities.
“It will be designed in a way to maintain that same visual comfort, but not have the expenses of operating it and cooling and heating that atrium,” he said.
HotelShift chose to partner with Voyage Capital because the latter has an existing Denver hotel portfolio and an in-house contracting firm.
“When I first showed it to Jai, even though it’s a big property and it’s kind of this inefficient architecture with this big atrium inside, he had some great ideas about how to keep the cost under control and who to hire to make sure that the project is done right,” Cartwright said.
A former economics professor, Cartwright said his proposed apartment building would have a competitive advantage in Denver’s rental market. While rent prices won’t be set for years, he envisions studio units going for $1,150 a month and one bedrooms for around $1,400.
“We like the Denver market because while there’s been a lot of construction, it’s all really A-class, A-minus construction. There’s not a boom of stuff that is relatively affordable or more of a B-minus or workforce-type product. So we thought that Denver could benefit from additional housing supply that is not at the top of the market in terms of pricing,” Cartwright said.
The project will be the third for HotelShift, which focuses exclusively on converting underperforming hotels into apartments. The seven-person company was founded in 2024 and has two ongoing projects in Houston, Texas. One is about two-thirds of the way through construction, and the other one is actively leasing, according to Cartwright.
“I didn’t really think I was ever going to leave academia,” said Cartwright, who previously taught at Ferris State University in Michigan. “I thought that the multifamily market was too frothy, and that cap rates were just too low. I thought that introduced a lot of downside risk that I wasn’t comfortable with.
“I kind of stumbled into looking at old hotels, and a light bulb went off that this would be a great market-driven way to increase the supply of affordable housing. And so I started researching and putting together resources to execute on hotel conversion, and we started doing projects.”
The Holiday Inn at 3333 Quebec St. was built in 1973, according to property records. (Thomas Gounley/BusinessDen)
Alex Cartwright thinks a 50-year-old Holiday Inn on the edge of where Denver’s Stapleton Airport once stood deserves a second shot at life.
“Nobody mismanaged anything,” he said. “The market has shifted. The architecture is old. I mean, after all, the airport moved. It’s not like that happens every day. So the highest and best use is no longer hospitality for this site.”
Cartwright’s Dallas, Texas-based firm HotelShift, which specializes in converting hotels into apartments, expects to go under contract this week to buy the 11-story, 310-room hotel at 3333 Quebec St.
He’s teaming up with fellow Dallas hotel company Voyage Capital to turn it into 220 to 240 apartments. Plans were submitted to Denver last month.
An adjacent office building, which connects to the hotel, is not part of the deal, Cartwright said. Philadelphia-based HHM Hotels purchased the property in 2021 for $15.7 million, according to public records.
“We came across this just through a network of hospitality brokers that we developed a relationship with,” Cartwright said. “And we like this property because of the large room sizes, and there are balconies on every room.”
Alex Cartwright
The hotel’s existing gym, ample meeting space, pool, handball courts and steam/sauna rooms would all be preserved for future residents. Its restaurant is being eyed for conversion into a sports bar, and the firms are looking to add a golf simulator on-site as well.
An atrium in the core of the square brown building presents some challenges, said Jai Desai, CEO of Voyage Capital, the firm partnering with Cartwright’s on the deal. He’s planning to wall it off with glass barriers to save on utilities.
“It will be designed in a way to maintain that same visual comfort, but not have the expenses of operating it and cooling and heating that atrium,” he said.
HotelShift chose to partner with Voyage Capital because the latter has an existing Denver hotel portfolio and an in-house contracting firm.
“When I first showed it to Jai, even though it’s a big property and it’s kind of this inefficient architecture with this big atrium inside, he had some great ideas about how to keep the cost under control and who to hire to make sure that the project is done right,” Cartwright said.
A former economics professor, Cartwright said his proposed apartment building would have a competitive advantage in Denver’s rental market. While rent prices won’t be set for years, he envisions studio units going for $1,150 a month and one bedrooms for around $1,400.
“We like the Denver market because while there’s been a lot of construction, it’s all really A-class, A-minus construction. There’s not a boom of stuff that is relatively affordable or more of a B-minus or workforce-type product. So we thought that Denver could benefit from additional housing supply that is not at the top of the market in terms of pricing,” Cartwright said.
The project will be the third for HotelShift, which focuses exclusively on converting underperforming hotels into apartments. The seven-person company was founded in 2024 and has two ongoing projects in Houston, Texas. One is about two-thirds of the way through construction, and the other one is actively leasing, according to Cartwright.
“I didn’t really think I was ever going to leave academia,” said Cartwright, who previously taught at Ferris State University in Michigan. “I thought that the multifamily market was too frothy, and that cap rates were just too low. I thought that introduced a lot of downside risk that I wasn’t comfortable with.
“I kind of stumbled into looking at old hotels, and a light bulb went off that this would be a great market-driven way to increase the supply of affordable housing. And so I started researching and putting together resources to execute on hotel conversion, and we started doing projects.”
