A converted downtown office tower now housing 343 hotel rooms near San Antonio's River Walk has a new owner. Highline Hospitality Partners has acquired the dual-branded AC Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk and Element San Antonio Riverwalk, marking the firm's fourth and fifth hotel purchases of 2026 and its first foray into the San Antonio hospitality market.
The deal, first reported by Hotel Business, pushes Highline's national portfolio to 21 hotels and roughly $1.7 billion in hospitality assets under management, with more than 5,500 guestrooms across its holdings. The property sits at 111 Soledad Street, a 20-story building constructed in 1983 that spent decades as an office tower before undergoing an adaptive-reuse redevelopment between 2019 and 2022, according to the same report. That earlier conversion, which turned the former Riverview Towers into the conjoined dual-branded hotel project, cost more than $100 million and was carried out by Raleigh-based Winston Hotels after it purchased the site from Primera Partners in 2019, per San Antonio Heron.
What's Inside the Dual-Branded Tower
The AC Hotel occupies floors 13 through 20 with 181 guestrooms, while the extended-stay Element brand fills floors 7 through 12 with 162 guestrooms featuring full-service kitchenettes and sleeper sofas, per Hotel Business's reporting. Between the two brands, the property includes two full-service food-and-beverage outlets, a fitness center, a business center, roughly 4,000 square feet of flexible meeting space, and 3,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The building's rooftop draw is 1Watson, a restaurant and bar on the 15th floor that, according to Trivago, overlooks the San Antonio River Walk, Main Plaza, and San Fernando Cathedral.
Beyond the guest rooms, the tower still carries 60,000 square feet of rentable office space spread across floors 3 through 6, according to CBRE. The office suites in that portion of the building range from 887 to nearly 7,000 rentable square feet. The site itself carries deeper local history: it once housed the Vaudeville Theater and Saloon, established in 1872 by San Antonio civic and business leader Jack Harris, per 1Watson.
Management Deal Deepens Avion Partnership
Highline has tapped Plano-based Avion Hospitality to manage the hotel, a move the report describes as forming another strategic partnership between the two companies. Avion was founded in 2022 by President and CEO Robert Burg, a former president and founding member of Aimbridge Hospitality, according to Avion Hospitality. Highline already provides third-party asset management services for four additional hotels managed on behalf of an institutional ownership group, separate from its owned portfolio.
Jordan Scheiman, per the Hotel Business report, said the hotels benefit from a strategic location steps from the River Walk in the growing Riverwalk West submarket. Chuck Pomerantz added that Highline added the AC and Element San Antonio Riverwalk to its portfolio and expanded its relationship with Avion, while also noting the properties are institutionally maintained and in like-new condition.
A Recapitalized Asset Amid a Recovering Market
The previous owners, Winston Hospitality and Concord Hospitality, had recapitalized the property with a $59 million, three-year floating-rate bridge loan from Peachtree Group in February 2025, according to Traded. That financing came roughly a year and a half before Highline's acquisition, and it underscores how active dealmaking has been around this single downtown address in the years since the office-to-hotel conversion wrapped up.
The sale also lands amid broader signs of stabilization in San Antonio's hospitality sector. STR hotel market benchmarking data published by Visit San Antonio in August showed citywide hotel occupancy averaging 60.5% year-to-date through June, with an average daily rate of $135 and revenue per available room of $82.
Part of a Wider River Walk Redevelopment Wave
Highline's entry into San Antonio adds to a string of downtown hotel transactions clustered near the River Walk this year. In June, a Brownsville-based operator acquired the 117-room TownePlace Suites on East Houston Street, another Marriott-flagged property near the same corridor. That same month, AT&T put its 15-story, 401,516-square-foot Riverwalk office building on the market for a possible hotel or mixed-use conversion, a move Hoodline covered as part of an ongoing pattern of legacy office towers being repositioned for hospitality use downtown.
The AC Hotel and Element San Antonio Riverwalk fits squarely into that pattern, having started life as an office building before its transformation into a dual-branded hotel. With this acquisition, Highline Hospitality Partners now holds a portfolio spanning 21 hotels nationwide, cementing its bet that downtown San Antonio's mix of adaptive-reuse supply and recovering occupancy still has room to run.
-4.webp?w=160&h=400&fit=crop&crop=edges)