This is the My Place Hotel in Marquette, Mich. Most of the franchise’s hotels have designs similar to this one. Courtesy of My Place Hotels
A developer has revealed plans for a 64-unit hotel near Vancouver Mall, adding to a growing list of recent and upcoming hotel projects in Vancouver.
The project would be part of a national chain called My Place Hotels. The application was submitted by Pacific Northwest My Place Hotels, LLC, which describes itself as the local franchisee for the My Place Hotel brand in Washington, Oregon, Alaska and British Columbia.
The proposed project would be located on an undeveloped 1.5-acre piece of land northwest of the mall, along the outer perimeter of the Vancouver Mall Loop. The nearly 30,000-square-foot building would be three stories — a total of 42 feet 5 inches high.
The site sits between two buildings that house a dental practice, an eye care center and a Red Cross blood donation center. The hotel would have a 72-space parking lot, branching from an entrance to the dental practice parking lot from the Mall Loop.
A pre-application conference with city planning staff is scheduled for Jan. 31. The pre-application doesn’t offer a construction timeline or opening date for the proposed hotel, and Pacific Northwest My Place Hotels could not be reached for comment.
The mall area has seen a couple of different projects on the inside of the loop in recent years. C-Tran built a Vancouver Mall transit center to the south side of the loop in 2016 in preparation for the opening of the Vine bus rapid transit line. And in September the mall submitted plans to build a restaurant and retail building at the southwest corner.
However, the mall isn’t involved with the hotel project. The mall doesn’t own the property on the outside of the Mall Loop, said mall marketing manager Bree Sanchez. Clark County records list the property owner as Dragon Properties LLC, but the company could not be contacted (a listed number for the company went instead to the city of Vancouver’s permitting office).
The My Place Hotels parent company operates dozens of hotels across more than 20 states, and its website lists several more in development. The first My Place hotel opened in 2012 in Aberdeen, S.D. The company was co-founded by Ron Rivett, who previously co-founded the Super 8 Motel chain in 1974, and his grandson Ryan Rivett, who serves as My Place’s CEO.
The Pacific Northwest branch of My Place includes five hotels with a sixth under construction. Other locations include Spokane Valley, Yakima and Bend, Ore. The Vancouver development would be the company’s first in the Portland area.
The company bills itself on its website as a high-quality, modestly priced and modern hotel option, with an emphasis on long-term stays in addition to overnights. Some rooms come equipped with refrigerators and stovetops, and the hotels feature a convenience store and laundry facilities. Listed prices at some of the company’s Pacific Northwest hotels start around $80 per night.
Four hotels are near Vancouver Mall: Comfort Suites, Days Inn, Howard Johnson Hotel & Suites and Best Western Plus, with listed rates of $65 to $80 per night.
Vancouver is in the midst of a resurgence in hotel construction following several years with no projects after the Great Recession. Several new hotel projects were announced starting in 2014, and a few have been completed, while others are still under construction or in the planning process.
“Since the recession, there was a lot of pent-up demand (for hotels rooms), and a lot of that growth didn’t really materialize until recently,” said Jacob Schmidt, director of marketing and communications at the regional marketing agency Visit Vancouver USA. “Most growth we’ve seen has been on the east side of Vancouver and downtown, with a few scattered throughout.”
The downtown Hilton Vancouver Washington will be joined in the coming years by the Hyatt Regency down the street, the AC by Marriott at Terminal 1 and the Hotel Indigo at The Waterfront Vancouver — if all the projects move forward as planned. More hotels were also recently built or are on the docket on Mill Plain Boulevard and in the 192nd Avenue corridor in east Vancouver.
“We’re forecasting that by 2021 we’ll have an increase in (hotel) rooms of about 33 percent,” Schmidt said. “And that’s just referring to hotels that have given us an (opening) date.”
Clark County is currently home to approximately 35 hotels, he said, with about another 12 proposed projects. Roughly half of those proposals are far enough along to have established construction timelines, while the others are in earlier development.
Visit Vancouver predicts small but consistent tourism growth in the coming years, Schmidt said, which means the new hotels will be beneficial, but they also raise concerns about oversaturating the market. The proposed My Place Hotel isn’t located in one of the current hotel growth hot spots, which Schmidt said is probably a good sign. He also pointed to My Place’s emphasis on long-term stays as a factor that might help the proposed hotel differentiate itself, because Vancouver’s other long-term stay options tend to be more high-end.
“This looks like it’s more of an economy extended stay, so maybe that fills a market niche that might not be filled right now,” he said.
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