TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa private equity real estate firm that already owns office towers next door has bought the 325-room Westshore Grand hotel and plans to remake much of the property over the next two years.
Ally Capital Group announced the deal on Thursday, Oct. 29. The firm is teaming with Black Diamond Capital on both the purchase and the renovation. Neither the sale price nor the expected cost of the work has been made public.
The hotel, at 4860 West Kennedy Boulevard, runs as part of Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio line. Plans call for redoing the guestrooms, upgrading the meeting and event rooms, freshening the shared spaces and improving the restaurant and bar offerings, with work rolling out in stages across 2027 and 2028. The company has not named a builder, set a start date or said how guests will be affected while crews are on site.
Valley National Bank is lending on the purchase, and the hotel finance firm Hodges Ward Elliott, part of Franklin Street, arranged the loan for Ally.
Ally chief executive Andrew Wright, who also founded the Tampa commercial real estate firm Franklin Street, described the hotel as a longtime gathering spot for the Westshore area that the new owners want to bring back. Next door, the firm already holds the twin Urban Centre office buildings, which it paid $123 million for in 2023. The hotel opened in 1984 and has roughly 14,300 square feet of meeting space.
The property faces the 53-acre WestShore Plaza site, where a proposed redevelopment would swap the mall for a mixed-use district. Ally expects to release more details about the hotel project in the coming months.
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