Hotel coming to Pentagon Park – Finance and Commerce

A Twin Cities hotelier prolific throughout the metro area over the past few years will now be one of the first in to build on Edinas Pentagon Park redevelopment site.

Bloomington-based JR Hospitality, along with Iowa development partner Hawkeye Hotels, plans to start construction next spring on a dual-branded Marriott hotel in the southern half of the site, named Pentagon Village. The five-story, 235-unit hotel will be the largest JR Hospitality has built in the Twin Cities and is part of the hoteliers 1,000-plus room pipeline of metro-area hotel projects currently in development.

An entity related to Hawkeye paid $3.45 million for the 1.8 acre site at 4931 77th St. W., according to a certificate of real estate value made public late last week. The property is in the northeast quadrant of Interstate 494 and Highway 100. The deal, which closed on Sept. 13, works out to $1.9 million per acre.

Work is expected to start next February or March, said JR Hospitality principal Jay Bhakta. The hotel will contain two hotel brands, a Towne Place Suites and a Fairfield Inn and Suites. The two hotels will be in the same building. Construction will take up to 16 months, Bhakta said in a Wednesday interview.

JR Hospitality and Hawkeye committed early this year to building on the site, he said. JR Hospitality recently opened a 209-room Courtyard by Marriott hotel a few blocks away at 4460 W. 78th St. Circle in Bloomington.

Pentagon Village is appealing as a location for the hotel due to its proximity to major highways, and for the amenities it will have at full buildout, Bhakta said. Those amenities will include park space and onsite retail and restaurants.

They want all those things within walking distance, Bhakta said of future hotel guests.

The bulk of the hotels rooms will likely be filled with business travelers most of the time, he said. But he also expects them to draw vacationers as well. The Fairfield will cater primarily to overnight guests, he said, while the extended-stay Towne Suites will likely accommodate people staying a minimum of four nights.

Prior to February, the hotel had been planned to be four stories tall and to have 193 rooms. The city approved a modification to the planned unit development plan for Pentagon Village to include the larger hotel at the request of Pentagon Park master developer Solomon Real Estate Group.

JR Hospitality and Hawkeye have not yet chosen a general contractor to build the new hotel. The project architect is Boca Raton, Florida-based Base 4.

JR Hospitality operates 887 hotel rooms in six Twin Cities properties, as well as a number of hotels outside Minnesota.

Construction is already underway on the 12.5 acre Pentagon Village site. A 423-stall parking structure is nearly complete, while work on two new retail buildings near the entrance to the site are out of the ground. Those buildings are planned to total 12,020 square feet of space, according to a city staff report.

Other buildings planned for the site include a 153-unit Waterwalk extended-stay hotel, an office building that could be as large as 215,000 square feet of space and an 18,000-square foot office and retail building.

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Hotel coming to Pentagon Park - Finance and Commerce