No developers answer Greensburg's call for hotel pitches

The Greensburg Community Development Corp. asked developers for their best pitches for a downtown hotel, but the extended deadline has come and gone, with no proposals submitted.

Ashley Kertes, director of the corporation, said she’s in talks with several developers interested in bringing a hotel to the city, though they did not respond to the corporation’s request for proposals.

Kertes said she’s confident a hotel project will “definitely” be announced this year.

“The hotel project is still on,” she said.

The Community Development Corp. and the city issued the request for proposals in late January. The original deadline of March 1 was extended to April 1 to give interested developers more time to complete proposals.

There are no hotels in the city. The only nearby lodging is in surrounding communities, mostly Hempfield.

Greensburg has long wanted that to change.

A downtown hotel has been in the city’s strategic plan since 2005. A 2017 feasibility study by Pittsburgh consultant Tripp Umbach found a hotel with 60 to 80 rooms would be profitable downtown.

The city came up with the idea to request proposals when talks with an unidentified hotel developer fell through last year.

Officials wanted a new developer to pick up where the last one left off, building the hotel at 225 S. Pennsylvania Ave. The long-vacant building is owned by Anthony Bucciero, president of Guardian Construction.

The city estimates it would take about $9 million to turn the building into a hotel.

Nationally, the hotel industry is enjoying sustained growth.

There was about $32 billion spent on building hotels, motels and resorts in 2018, more than double what was spent five years ago, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

More than 5,500 new hotel projects were in various stages of development in the United States at the end of 2018, according to real estate analysis firm Lodging Econometrics. That’s a 7% jump from 2017 and the seventh consecutive year of industry growth.