ROCKLAND, Maine — The city planning board will review next week a proposal by the owner of two of the city’s largest motels to convert more rooms into residential condominiums.
Liberty Hospitality of Maine has submitted a proposal that will be considered on March 3 to convert nine motel rooms at the Navigator Motor Inn into three residential condos. The project is estimated to cost $54,000 and to be completed in three months.
The Navigator had previously converted motel rooms into three other condos. Once the proposed conversion is done, the Main Street downtown motel will have six condos and 63 motel rooms.
Only one of the first three condos has been sold, but a second is in the process of being sold, according to Robert Liberty, owner of Liberty Hospitality, and he expects to be able to sell the rest.
Liberty Hospitality also owns the Trade Winds Motor Inn on Park Drive in Rockland. The Trade Winds already has created 19 timeshare units out of hotel rooms and three more are being constructed this year from motel rooms. The Trade Winds has 91 hotel rooms in addition to the timeshare units.
The conversion of hotel rooms into condos comes even as more hotel rooms are on the horizon for Rockland.
ADZ Properties LLC is constructing a five-story hotel at the intersection of Main and Pleasant streets. The $2.9 million project will feature 26 suites, which the company previously said it hoped to open in July.
And Stuart and Marianne Smith plan to build a 65-suite, four-story waterfront hotel on the waterfront in Rockland. No formal plans have been submitted to the city but Stuart Smith said in December that the Rockland project would move forward once the conversion of a historic two-story, 12,000-square-foot brick building in downtown Camden into a 22-room hotel is complete. The Camden project is expected to be done in June.
Liberty said both the five-story hotel and the Smith hotel are not in the same market as the Trade Winds and Navigator. He said his two motels are mid-level ones that charge $175 per night during the tourist season. Liberty said he expects that the suites in the two new hotels will cost double that and will be geared toward people who now stay at bed and breakfasts.
Liberty said when the recession hit in 2008, the demand for rooms at his facilities during the offseason fell dramatically. He said prior to that recession, construction workers would occupy many rooms in the two motels, but that has not been the case in the past seven years.
In addition, he said the number of tour buses with retired people has fallen off and not recovered to the prerecession level. Those are among the reasons, Liberty said, that led him to convert hotel rooms into condos at the Navigator and timeshares at the Trade Winds.