Seven-story AC Hotel breaks ground in Denver’s RiNo neighborhood

Crews have begun building an AC Hotel at 3680 Brighton Blvd., next to the Rev360 office building.

The hotel will be seven stories and have 128 guestrooms, according to the project’s site development plan, which also shows about 2,500 square feet of restaurant space on the first floor.

The hotel is being developed by RiNo36 LLC, which bought the 0.43-acre property — formerly home to an auto repair shop — in February 2020 for $4 million, records show.

Lance Sigmon, of Albuquerque-based Allen Sigmon Real Estate Group, said the development team is made up of his firm, Alliance Investments, Hamant Patel’s Lotus Hotels and Prakash Sundaram’s TMS Management.

This is the first Colorado hotel for Allen Sigmon, which lists four in New Mexico on the portfolio section of its website. But Lotus is linked to a number of other Denver-area hotels.

Sigmon said Marriott reached out to Patel, and asked if he’d consider doing an AC Hotel at the location. The brand, which Sigmon said has a “modern layout with sleek furnishings,” already has a presence in downtown Denver and Frisco.

Besides COVID, which hit shortly after the team bought the land, the developers had a couple hurdles: the typical slow pace of Denver entitlements and financing. The latter ultimately came from a bank with a total of three branches in Carlsbad, New Mexico — population 31,000. Sigmon signed the paperwork on the LLC’s $34.87 million construction loan from CNB Bank in November.

Bristlecone Construction is the general contractor.