Downtown Fresno’s Radisson Hotel building again listed for sale. What’s next?

Downtown Fresno’s Radisson Hotel building is once again up for sale less than three years after investors bought it for an estimated $9.27 million.

This time, the building is listed for sale at $14.9 million — a 60% increase from the Radisson’s 2023 sale price.

Sevak Khatchadourian, a member of the building’s ownership group and investor in several other Fresno properties, told The Bee he could not comment on plans for the 197-room hotel because of confidentiality agreements.

But an Oct. 31 listing on the commercial real estate website LoopNet shows the property, located on Van Ness Avenue across the street from Courthouse Park, is being pitched as a “hotel rebrand” or “apartment conversion” opportunity.

“It’s my understanding the intent is to sell it for a mixed-use retail-apartment,” Mayor Jerry Dyer said Wednesday in a phone interview.

The LoopNet listing comes after years of speculation as to what owners might do with the nine-story building they bought in March 2023, just months after it closed because of fire code violations. Katchadourian told The Bee at the time that he and his partners had not yet decided between reopening it as a hotel, office space or something else.

Converting the old Radisson Hotel building into apartments could prove expensive for developers. Dyer said a conversion could bring more housing units to downtown Fresno key to the mayor’s plans for downtown revitalization that include bringing thousands of new residents to the area.

Dyer said he would support a conversion if it resulted in mixed-use housing “with a heavy emphasis on market-rate.”

“We definitely need more people downtown, and this would give people an opportunity to do that,” he said.

City Councilmember Miguel Arias, whose district covers downtown Fresno, said a re-sell of the building is an example of developers flipping properties in Fresno instead of making use of them. He said he previously discouraged a developer who wanted to build a homeless shelter from trying to buy the space because he believed Khatchadourian’s group planned to reopen it as a hotel.

“It’s already being put for sale as a potential flip, which is exactly the opposite of what Fresno needs,” he told The Bee.

Downtown Fresno hotel rebrand vs. apartment conversion

The LoopNet listing shows the Radisson Hotel building is up for sale as a “dual path opportunity,” meaning it could be redeveloped as an apartment building or reopened as a hotel with a new brand.

But Arias said the conversion opportunity pitch is concerning to him because it would be a “massive conversion” and would cost “tens of millions of dollars.”

Arias said he expected Khatchadourian’s group to reopen the building as hotel space, which he said downtown “desperately needs” to maximize the use of its large venues, including Chukchansi Park, Selland Arena and the Fresno Convention and Entertainment Center.

“Too often we are losing acts to Save Mart Center and hotel groups to other parts of the city and neighboring cities,” he said, “because we’ve been unable to make the available rooms downtown fully operational for years now.”

Erik Galicia

The Fresno Bee

Erik is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, where he helped launch an effort to better meet the news needs of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Before that, he served as editor-in-chief of his community college student newspaper, Riverside City College Viewpoints, where he covered the impacts of the Salton Sea’s decline on its adjacent farm worker communities in the Southern California desert. Erik’s work is supported through the California Local News Fellowship program.