Overall investment, including land acquisition, will be at least $2.5 million.
“We didn’t want to use the building,” he said. “We wanted to start fresh.”
Demolition started in December on the structure, which was abandoned in 2014 and caught fire in 2016 and 2017. The project should be completed by this fall, Bedi said.
Moraine Self Storage will employ as many as 10 people, Bedi said. It will offer traditional self-storage, plus rentals and a store “just like UPS or U-Haul,” he said.
Built in 1969, the 78-room The Moraine Inn Suites & Conference Center went through a host of owners, according to the Montgomery County Auditor’s Office. The site sold for more than $5.3 million in 2000, for $3.1 million in 2004, $2.1 million in 2010, $950,000 in 2012 and $820,000 in 2013.
Bedi, who purchased the nearly 5-acre site for $450,000 in December 2019, said it was appealing to him because its offered east entrance and exit and is located right off Interstate 75 exit near to Dayton and Wright State University.
Because of changes to the hotel industry during the pandemic, and the likely $10 million price tag for constructing such a structure, construction of a storage facility made more sense than building a new hotel,” he said.
“Occupancy is down everywhere ... and I don’t know if (hotel construction) is the right move to make with the COVID pandemic going on right now,” Bedi said. “We did some research and self-storage is booming.”
He said he hired a company to conduct a feasibility study in the area and learned that “there’s some demand for self-storage” there and that self-storage sites are 80 to 90 percent full.
“As a developer, we don’t want to be in just one business,” he said. “We want to try out different businesses.”
LDI Hospitality Management, which has as many as 75 employees nationwide, recently rebranded the former Ramada Plaza Cincinnati Sharonville Hotel as Ohio’s first Delta Hotels by Marriott.
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