MACON, Ga. — Anil Rathore looks at downtown Macon and sees the vision.
“We looked into Macon seeing that it's at the beginning of a renaissance basically,” Rathore said.
He and his father have run Indo US Ventures running hotels in North Carolina for the past 30 years.
Looking at the old downtown Ramada Inn, he says he wants in on the potential.
“So, we started doing our due diligence. We liked the story – we liked the narrative of Macon,” he explained. “The larger investor downtown, they're investing about $100 million. You know, people don't throw $100 million into an area without having some substantiation of success."
So, in the Nov. 15 auction, they put in a bid to buy it and they won.
“We had the highest price $4.1 million. The auction closed, we signed the paperwork and we submitted our deposit– $400,000. Plus there's an additional fee of $200,000 for the auction house,” Rathore said.
The hotel's receiver took the down payment and Rathore says he thought it was a done deal.
“I know the papers aren’t signed, but we made our deposit. I know we can acquire it, let me start taking care of the things that are damaging the infrastructure. I literally started taking inventory of what's there,” Rathore said. “A couple days later, they terminated the contract."
Contractually, the receiver, Dan Akridge of the Great American Hotel Group can terminate the sale at any point.
Rathore says he emailed him that same day on Nov. 24.
“‘Hey, I understand that you terminated this agreement. What can we do to get back to the table? We are very interested in this project, we’d like to acquire it,’” he explained.
Rathore says Akridge didn't respond.
A few days later, he says he emailed the broker overseeing the sale to ask what was going on.
“His response was, 'I don't know.’ This is on the 27th, the day the county is submitting their contract,” Rathore said. “He said wait til the new year to get clarification to what the owners want to do.”
Rathore says on Dec. 19, he was told by the hotel’s grounds caretaker that Macon-Bibb County offered $4.5 million to purchase the hotel and the receiver accepted the deal.
“I would think as the receiver, it’s your duty to reach out to both parties, ‘Hey, we have a counter offer. Are you willing to pay more?’” Rathore said.
He says they were so excited to buy the hotel and were willing to invest $20 million to repair the hotel. He says they were speaking with the Holiday Inn brand to create a high-end boutique hotel.
They still want to.
“I mean, we can go $100,000 above what the county is offering. We’re willing to increase our value,” he said. “We’ll risk our capital to bring the vision that the council and the mayor wants – in conjunction that we want," Rathore said. "Don’t risk the taxpayer capital. Let us risk our capital, and the taxpayers benefit because you get a new tax base. We’ll probably create about 200 jobs that the county doesn’t have to be responsible for.”
He says he knows he missed the deadline to file an objection to the sale in federal court, but he says he hopes the county sees their potential and works out a deal to buy the property.
We reached out to the spokesman for the receiver, but we weren't able to reach him for comment.