Lender winds up as owner of foreclosed San Jose hotel project site

SAN JOSE — A San Jose project site intended to hold a new hotel — whose development future is murky due to coronavirus-linked economic woes — is now owned by a unit of the property’s lender after the formal completion of a real estate foreclosure.

The proposed hotel development — if built — would consist of 200 rooms and is located in North San Jose’s Alviso district near the Topgolf entertainment, dining and golfing hub.

Pine Tree Investment & Management, a South Korea-based real estate firm that acted through an affiliate, now is the owner of the hotel development land, documents filed on May 4 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office show.

Through a trustee’s deed, the affiliate of Pine Tree Investment paid $27.6 million to buy the land in the wake of a foreclosure proceeding. The hotel site is located at 7 Topgolf Drive.

A different South Korea-based firm, operating as Mirae-San Jose, paid $22.5 million in 2019 for the hotel site, which consists of 3.2 acres of land.

San Jose city officials approved the 200-room hotel project in 2019. However, the hotel has never been constructed.

Soon after the approval and the property purchase, the coronavirus pandemic crippled the worldwide hotel and travel sector amid wide-ranging business shutdowns across the globe. Hotels in the Bay Area were hit hard.

Unbuilt hotels such as the Topgolf Drive project face a particularly uncertain future, especially since existing hotels are still attempting to fully recover from their coronavirus-spawned maladies.