Moxy Hotel Shutters in Oakland After Loan Default

In the latest sign of the hospitality market’s downturn in the East Bay, Oakland’s only boutique hotel has closed its doors.

The 172-room Moxy Hotel has shuttered after the hotel’s owner defaulted on a $35 million loan from Acore Capital Mortgage in August, the San Francisco Standard reported. The property’s owner, 2225 Telegraph Property LLC, refinanced the building in 2022; the entity’s address in state records is tied to Minnesota-based Graves Hospitality.

Graves Hospitality and San Francisco-based real estate development firm Tidewater Capital began developing the hotel in 2019. At the time, confidence in uptown Oakland was high amid a construction boom and an influx of residents and businesses from San Francisco. Construction on the Moxy began as development firm TMG planned a 28-floor office building across the street and Kaiser plotted a 1.6-million-square-foot headquarters blocks away.

The pandemic quickly threw cold water on that optimism. When the Moxy opened in spring 2021, Kaiser had abandoned its plans as it faced delays and rising costs, while TMG’s development had stalled; a chain-link fence now surrounds that empty lot across the street. The Moxy’s exterior lights are still on, though the interior is empty and heat lamps and deck chairs are abandoned on the second-floor balcony, according to the Standard.

The Moxy was “a victim of wrong place and wrong time, considering how much positive momentum Oakland had prior to the pandemic,” Louis Thibault of Avison Young told the Standard.

In September, after the hotel fell into default, a court appointed Michelle Russo, CEO of asset management firm HotelAVE, as receiver to manage the property. Two months later, the county tax collector issued a lien for nearly $102,000 in unpaid property taxes. The hotel then quietly stopped accepting new reservations.

Russo has been entrenched in the ongoing hotel woes in the Bay Area. She was appointed as receiver of Parc 55 and Hilton Union Square in San Francisco in 2023 after those properties also fell into default. The hotels were sold to Newbond Holdings and Conversant Capital last fall.

Oakland, like San Francisco, has had its fair share of lodging troubles.

Last January, the Waterfront Hotel in Jack London Square closed suddenly and the Radisson Hotel Oakland Airport was hit with a foreclosure lawsuit. In downtown Oakland, a dual-branded Residence Inn and AC Hotel downtown was seized by its lender in April. Three months later, the Oakland Marriott City Center, the largest hotel in town, sold at foreclosure. The Residence Inn, AC Hotel and Marriott City Center properties remain open to guests.

— Chris Malone Méndez