D2 Capital Advisors Arranges $23.5 Million Hotel Construction Financing
Marriott-branded hotel opening at $1B redevelopment of former DuPont campus in Wilmington
A Marriott-branded extended-stay hotel is slated to open in MRA Group's Chestnut Run Innovation & Science Park, a $1 billion redevelopment of a former DuPont campus in Wilmington.
The Horsham real estate firm plans to break ground on the 127-key Marriott Residence Inn in early February. The four-story, roughly 90,000-square-foot hotel is set to open in the spring of 2026.
The Marriott Residence Inn will add to the amenities at the 164-acre, 1.3 million-square-foot Chestnut Run Innovation & Science Park, also known as CRISP. Existing and planned offerings at the campus include office, co-working and lab space, childcare and fitness centers, a bank, a restaurant and outdoor recreation spaces.
The Marriott Residence Inn is expected to serve both business and non-business travelers and is being touted by MRA Group as the first hotel to be built in the area in nearly three years. The 134-key Staybridge Suites Wilmington Downtown and the 24-room boutique property the Quoin both opened in downtown Wilmington in 2022.
The closest hotels to the innovation campus are located roughly four miles away in downtown Wilmington. That includes the 96-key Residence Inn Wilmington Downtown that opened in 2018.
In addition to short-term and long-term overnight accommodations, the Marriott Residence Inn will offer food service, a full-service bar, meeting space and outdoor patio areas open to hotel guests, CRISP tenants and residents of the nearby community. It is being developed in partnership with Gulph Creek Hotels, a Wayne-based hotel management company.
The hotel will be located next to the entrance of the campus, with frontage along Route 141.
D2 Capital Advisors arranged $23.5 million in construction financing for the project. WSFS Bank, Nuveen Green Capital and Sustainable Energy Utility Incorporated are the lenders.
MRA Group acquired the former DuPont Chestnut Run Plaza campus for $40 million in 2021. At the time, the 984 Centre Road property had 14 existing buildings totaling 780,000 square feet.
The real estate firm initially planned a $500 million, 900,000-square-foot redevelopment of the campus, but the project was later expanded to 1.3 million square feet, doubling the price tag.
In 2023, MRA Group secured $63 million in financing for the next phase of the campus' redevelopment. The majority of that funding went toward the construction of a 102,000-square-foot building developed for specialty chemicals manufacturer Solenis. That financing was also used to renovate existing campus buildings for lab, research and development and advanced manufacturing space.
Residence Inn is one of Marriott International Inc.'s (NASDAQ: MAR) long-term stay hotel brands. Along with the two Wilmington properties, Marriott has several other hotels throughout Greater Philadelphia operating under the Residence Inn flag, including properties in Center City, Glen Mills, Conshohocken, Langhorne and Cherry Hill and Deptford, New Jersey.