The Days Inn hotel in downtown Oil City has been scheduled for a sheriff’s sale in May.
A notice of sale for the 100-plus room motel was issued last week by the Venango County sheriff’s office. A property is listed for sheriff sale when it has been issued a foreclosure notice for failure to pay a loan or has accumulated significant unpaid tax bills.
The public sale statement notes the judgment figure filed against the hotel owners is $1,417,388.56.
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 has been the subject of speculation for several months. Last fall, city officials remarked that hotel representatives had shared that the business was “in reorganization” and would have only a few rooms open for visitors.
An area within the inn’s parking lot would remain open for lease to city employees.
However, the hotel owners posted a notice on the Days Inn front door in early January that “effective Jan. 16, the Days Inn of Oil City is temporarily closed.”
This week, the sheriff sale notice was also posted on the front door. Telephone calls to the hotel were not answered and no staff appeared to be on duty.
The hotel lists no delinquent property taxes. The current tax levies for city, county and school amount to about $18,500. A breakdown shows Oil City Area School District, $9,929.20; City of Oil City, $6,407.95; and Venango County, $3,160.093.
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 Hotel, part of the Wyndham Hotel Chain.
