A sheriff’s sale of the Days Inn hotel in Oil City set for Wednesday has been postponed until next month.
In March, the Venango County sheriff’s office issued a notice of sale for the 100-plus room motel. It was listed because a foreclosure notice had been filed against the owners for failure to pay a loan.
The judgment figure levied against the hotel owners is $1,417,388.56.
The parties involved in the sale are First Western SBLC Inc. of Dallas, Texas, which is a loan agency, and SAI Family Holdings.
The SAI company is comprised of four members of the Pandit family who purchased the Oil City hotel in February 2017. Court documents show the Pandits are also defendants in a related debt collection case in Texas.
The downtown hotel had been irregularly opened to customers for the past several months. In mid-January, the hotel owners posted a notice on the inn’s front door that “effective Jan. 16, the Days Inn of Oil City is temporarily closed.”
When city officials asked the owners about the fate of the hotel, they were told the business was “in reorganization” and would have only a few rooms open for visitors. Meanwhile, an area within the inn’s parking lot remains open to city employees as a result of a lease with the city.
The hotel, constructed as a 112-room, five story Holiday Inn at a cost of $1.6 million, opened for business in August 1965 on a 3.5-acre site formerly occupied by the Pennsylvania Railroad depot.
The demolition work and subsequent rebuilding effort were part of the expansive Plaza Project, one of four major downtown redevelopment efforts in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Several years later, the hotel owners left the Holiday Inn chain and in 2001 renamed it the Arlington, the name of Oil City’s once leading hotel on Seneca Street. Ownership of the hotel changed again and it became affiliated with America’s Best Value Inn.
In 2013, it became a Days Inn, part of the Wyndham hotel chain.
