HRV Hotel Partners chosen to develop $130M CU on-campus hotel, conference center

BOULDER — HRV Hotel Partners LLC, a New Mexico-based hotel builder and project management firm, was selected Thursday by the University of Colorado Board of Regents to lead the development of a new hotel and conference center on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus. 

The facility, which will be used for “large and prominent academic, research and other conferences and events,” will be located on a roughly 3-acre plot on Grandview Avenue in the northwest corner of campus, according to a CU news release. Terms of CU’s ground lease with HRV are still being finalized.

The  250-room hotel and a 25,000-square-foot conference center project is estimated to cost about $130 million to complete.

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“There is currently no comparable facility existing in Boulder County,” according to CU documents.

Construction could begin as soon as mid-2020, and the hotel could be open by 2022.

“I couldn’t be more excited for this long-awaited project to begin coming to fruition,” CU Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano said in a prepared statement. “The hotel and conference center will provide a new stage for showcasing CU Boulder’s leadership, innovation and impact.”

HRV has formed a special entity, CU Hotel LLC, which will be used for firm’s working to “design, build, finance, own, operate, and maintain a hotel conference center,” according to university documents.

“HRV’s team, concept and overall proposal really reflected the relationship between the campus and community that we envisioned for this project,” CU’s executive director of real estate services Derek Silva said in a emailed statement to BizWest.

The hotel project, which CU leaders have envisioned for more than a decade, was initially planned for a larger parcel at Folsom Street and Arapahoe Avenue. At the request of Boulder city officials, the university shifted focus to the Grandview Avenue location in 2016.

A memorandum of understanding signed by the school and the city in 2016 established that the city would provide CU with at least 45 percent of accommodation tax revenue generated by the hotel over a 20 year period. 

“The hotel and conference center will diversify revenue sources for the university to help meet our mission of education and research while helping to contain the cost of a degree for students and their families,” CU spokesman Josh Lindenstein said in an email to BizWest.