SAN JOSE — An iconic hotel in downtown San Jose is open and operating again and has launched some renovations as it prepares for guests slated to attend a huge Nvidia tech conference next month.
Hotel De Anza, a 10-story lodging tower at 233 West Santa Clara St., closed its doors in May 2024. Hotel De Anza General Manager Amelia Hernandez said the lodging tower reopened in December.
Hotel De Anza, a 100-room, 10-story historic highrise at 233 West Santa Clara Street in downtown San Jose, as seen on Feb. 6, 2024. (George Avalos/Bay Area News Group)
In May, a hotel staffer said that the repair work during 2024 was focused on attempting to remedy water damage.
Officials with the hotel are now working to complete one or more renovation endeavors, Hernandez said. She didn’t specify the nature of the work.
Side entrance of Hotel De Anza, a 10-story, 100-room historic highrise at 233 West Santa Clara Street in downtown San Jose, as seen on Feb. 6, 2024. (George Avalos/Bay Area News Group)
Hotels all over the South Bay, and in San Jose in particular, are preparing for an upcoming Nvidia conference focusing on the AI sector and other cutting-edge fields. The 2024 event brought throngs of visitors to downtown San Jose.
Earlier this month, work was underway in a large room next to the West Santa Clara Street entrance, according to a direct observation by this news organization.
The 100-room hotel is one of San Jose’s few Zig Zag Moderne, or Art Deco, buildings. It was built in 1931 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. The hotel was renovated in 2015.
The hotel faced demolition in the 1970s after it had become dilapidated. The San Jose Redevelopment Agency, which is now defunct, was able to rescue the building and arrange for its reconstruction.
The Hotel De Anza is one of San Jose’s best-known lodging places, perched on a prominent spot at the corner of West Santa Clara Street and Notre Dame Avenue.
In October 2024, the historic hotel highrise was bought for roughly half of what it was previously worth.
Purchased for $11.5 million, Hotel De Anza’s price represented an additional sign of weakness in the lodging market.
An ownership group headed up by Dhaval Panchal, a Northern California hotel owner, bought the property.
The price the new ownership group paid was 54% below the hotel property’s value of $25.2 million in January 2024, as estimated by the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office.
Panchal, the head of the group that is the new owner of the Hotel De Anza, owns smaller hotels along the California coast, according to Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group, which tracks the California lodging market.
These are the 20-room Vendange Carmel Inn & Suites in Carmel-by-the Sea and Seal Cove Inn near Half Moon Bay in Moss Beach.
The ownership group headed up by Panchal also obtained a combined total of $13 million in financing at the time of the purchase, county public documents show.
The loans consisted of $5.9 million in Small Business Administration-backed financing from CalPrivate Bank, $3.6 million from Mortgage Capital Development and $3.5 million from Lincon Capital Management, according to the property records.
The Hotel De Anza property was the collateral for all three loans.
The current meltdown in hotel prices in the Bay Area is worse than even the slump associated with the recession and the financial crisis that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, in Reay’s view.
