After sitting vacant for three years, there is talk about another buyer for the former Days Inn hotel in Oil City.
Two years have passed since Oil City Hospitality, a Richmond, Virginia-based company, purchased the property from First Western SBLC Inc., of Dallas.
The bank was the sole bidder for the 106-room riverfront hotel at a Venango County sheriff’s sale in mid-2020.
He said Shah told him he is in negotiations with a buyer for the hotel, and Shah promised to call him back soon.
Shah made that call to Schroyer last week.
Schroyer said that during last week’s call, Shah told him he may have an agreement to sell the hotel and he will know in two weeks if the deal goes through.
“He didn’t say who the buyer was but attorneys out of Meadville are handling the transactions,” Schroyer said noting the local connection. “The two potential buyers have a background in running hotels,” Schroyer added.
The potential buyers would plan to renovate the hotel “from top to bottom” and keep the building as a hotel, Schroyer said Shah told him.
Schroyer also said the city met last week with the Oil Region Alliance, Oil City Main Street Program and the Venango Area Chamber of Commerce to discuss the hotel.
In early 2021, Shah said, “We will reopen the hotel as a Days Inn. Hopefully, the goal is to have it open by early May or June.”
At that time, Shah said, the company was actively buying hotels “because of the opportunities created by COVID, especially in small communities that are in university markets or near interstates. We can renovate them and make them nicer.”
Oil City, he also said at the time, is an area that presents “a lot of opportunity” and that the company would consider “all ideas” for the property.
Days Inn General Manager Sachin Patel told the newspaper in July 2021 that he had hoped to have some rooms in the hotel up and running by the Oil Heritage Festival later that month.
Patel, when contacted by the newspaper in 2022, said the hotel will be open “this year for sure.”
He said at the time the hotel had two water main breaks that had caused damage, and he also said then he was waiting for warmer weather to paint the exterior of the building.
The hotel was built as a five-story Holiday Inn at a cost of $1.6 million and opened for business in August 1965.
It was one of the focal points of Oil City’s social and business scene for the better part of the next three decades.
The hotel was later renamed the Arlington and became part of the America’s Best Value Inn chain. Then in 2013 it became a Days Inn as part of the Wyndham Hotel chain.
