A five-story, 113-room hotel proposed for 201 Plymouth Road in Plymouth Meeting is back before local officials, with the property owner and a hospitality developer asking Plymouth Township to move the long-pending project toward preliminary plan approval. The applicants are scheduled to appear before the township's planning agency on November 11 at 7:00 p.m., seeking a recommendation that would push the plan closer to reality after years of starts and stops.
The hotel would carry the Residence Inn brand, according to the township agenda, as reported by MoreThanTheCurve. The property owner, 201 Plymouth Road, LLC, is proposing the project alongside SMG Hotels, the outlet notes. This is not a brand-new idea for the site: the hotel plan was previously approved, and the applicants have sought extensions in recent years to keep that approval alive.
A Years-Long Path Through Township Review
Records back up just how long this proposal has been in the pipeline. Plymouth Township's own September 2023 regular meeting agenda listed a land development item for SMG Hotels at 201 Plymouth Road, with an expiration date of December 31, 2023, according to a Plymouth Township meeting agenda. The repeated extensions suggest a project that has cleared zoning hurdles but has yet to move into construction.
Before the current proposal took shape, the nearly five-acre parcel itself was being marketed for sale with the explicit possibility of redevelopment as a hotel or other uses, the township's planning history shows. Per the earlier listing details, hotel, retail, and hospitality uses are permitted by right on the site, while senior living or active adult living options would have required conditional-use approval from Plymouth Township Council. The property stretches from Plymouth Road to Corson Lane and sits between The Pinnacle senior living facility and nearby homes, with the listing handled by Jeffrey Cohen and Nelson Wax of CBRE.
A Regional Hotel Market in Flux
The Plymouth Road proposal arrives as Plymouth Meeting's hotel landscape shifts in the opposite direction elsewhere in the township. The Zoning Hearing Board voted 3-1 to approve converting the former DoubleTree Suites by Hilton Hotel Philadelphia West into 213 apartments, according to montco.today. That six-story property at 640 Fountain Road, which closed in late November, is planned to hold a mix of 173 one-bedroom and 40 two-bedroom units once converted, the outlet reports.
The DoubleTree building itself was a 253-room hotel built in 1987 on nearly eight acres with 347 parking spaces, per the same account. Kingsbury Hospitality REIT I Inc. owns that property, having purchased it for $22.3 million in 2022. The conversion fits a wider pattern described by montco.today, which notes that aging or underperforming commercial properties are increasingly being converted into residential units to meet growing housing demand across the region.
That contrast underscores the uncertainty facing hospitality real estate even as the Plymouth Road hotel plan moves forward on its own track. One project in Plymouth Meeting is shedding hotel rooms for apartments, while another, a few years in the making, is still trying to clear the preliminary plan stage for a brand-new Residence Inn. Whether the planning agency grants the requested recommendation on November 11 will determine the next step for the 201 Plymouth Road proposal, which has already weathered multiple extensions since its initial approval.
