Los Gatos Lodge, a 128-room hotel at 50 Saratoga-Los Gatos Road in Los Gatos.
LOS GATOS — A big Bay Area homebuilder has struck a deal to buy a Depression-era Los Gatos hotel as a potential prelude to a housing development at a prime location.
SummerHill Homes has obtained a purchase contract to buy Los Gatos Lodge, a well-known hotel on a choice site in the affluent town.
The homebuilder is buying an 8.8-acre site at 50 Los Gatos-Saratoga Road, according to documents filed on Oct. 20 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office.
The terms of the purchase agreement weren’t disclosed in the public filing.
“We will replace the lodge with housing,” Anabelle Salum, director of marketing with SummerHill Homes, said in a comment emailed to this news organization.
The garden-style hotel totals 128 rooms and consists of multiple buildings.
The seller is an entity managed by Keet Nerhan, a Bay Area resident.
This isn’t the first attempt by the Nerhan-led group to sell Los Gatos Lodge.
In 2019, Nerhan reached a sales deal with Nexus Development, an Orange County-based real estate firm. That deal was terminated three months later, county documents show.
Nerhan bought the hotel in 1996 from Alleghany Properties. Terms weren’t disclosed.
“The original hotel was built in 1936 and has not undergone significant remodeling or reconstruction since the 1970s,” a report circulated in 2014 by the Town of Los Gatos stated.
In the wake of the coronavirus-spawned business shutdowns that state and local government officials imposed to combat the spread of the deadly virus, numerous hotel properties in the Bay Area and nationwide have struggled to regain their pre-COVID economic vibrancy.
As a result, some developers are eying housing as a potential alternative.
Multiple real estate firms appear to see residential development as a viable future use for the old Los Gatos Lodge, the municipality’s 2014 report indicated.
“The town has received numerous inquiries from prospective residential developers” to buy the Los Gatos Lodge property, the report stated.
