Before renovation can start, nearly everything must go from Cedar Rapids’ Five Season Hotel

CEDAR RAPIDS - Restoring the “upscale” luster to the city's 32-year-old Five Seasons Hotel starts with getting rid of most of what is inside it - from the equipment in the 15-story building's two kitchens to everything from beds, desks, armoires, old box TVs and ironing boards in the building's 276 guest rooms.

“Everything is going to go,” reports John Frew, the city's consulting project manager for the hotel renovation and the city's Convention Complex project.

By a Thursday afternoon deadline, two national liquidation firms had submitted sealed bids to City Hall to purchase nearly all of the hotel's contents, which Frew estimated will bring the city somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 for use on the hotel renovation project. The cost of the renovation was put at $28 million in a bond-rating agency's report just this week.

Frew said about six “pretty aggressive” liquidation firms had been through the hotel in the last year to assess the value of the contents. Most of the firms buy cheaply enough with the idea of selling at higher cost to motel chains, he said.

However, one of the two firms that submitted bids by Thursday's deadline plans for a “controlled sale,” which would allow the public to come into the hotel and buy individual items, the city's purchasing services office reported.

The two bidders are Hotel Furniture Liquidators, Galesburg, Ill., and National Content Liquidators Inc., Springboro, Ohio.

Frew said he understood that one liquidation service's website had been conditionally preselling items from the Five Seasons Hotel just to gauge market demand.

The city did not automatically decide that it would get rid of most of the hotel's contents, said Frew, who acknowledged that some furniture in the guest rooms is of fairly recent vintage given that the most recent owners had attempted to upgrade the hotel to satisfy the demands of the hotel's former brand, Crowne Plaza.

“Beds, desks, armoires and lamps have been purchased within the last five years or so, so they still have a shelf life. We expect the city to get a nice check for all this stuff,” Frew said.

The hotel's previous owners lost the hotel to its creditors in December 2008, and the creditors, unable to sell the hotel in the private market, sold it to the city this March. The Crowne Plaza name came off the hotel as it closed for renovation.

Frew said the city learned what it could keep in the hotel is dependent on the brand the city wants the hotel to carry.

He noted, for instance, that the Ramada hotel/motel chain toured the building and found the existing furnishings largely acceptable for its standards. However, Ramada ranks as a “midscale” hotel on one national ranking scale while the city is hoping to secure one of three “upscale” brands, Sheraton, Doubletree by Hilton or Radisson, Frew said.

All three of those hotel chains have been through the hotel with their design teams and architects, who concluded, “We don't want anything of this,” Frew said. He called much of it “pretty dated stuff.”

“So we need to get rid of it,” he said. “So then what do you do?”

He said the city asked experts about the possibility of having a giant yard sale where the public could come in and buy items. “Everyone” said safety and liability issues made such a sale a bad option, he said.

If the successful bidder conducts a yard sale, Frew suggested the bidder might have to offer a higher price to the city to cover safety and liability issues.

Once the liquidation firm is picked by the City Council on May 24, Frew said it might take a month to empty the hotel of its contents, a job he said would not be easy because of elevator size and limited access to the hotel's loading dock.

“They got it in there, so we know it all fits,” he said. “But getting it out is going to be difficult.”

He noted that 10 pieces of art donated to the hotel in the past will be excluded from the liquidation sale.

Frew said the budget for the hotel renovation had anticipated a cost of $1.5 million to replace furniture and furnishing in the hotel's guest rooms. The hotel had 276 rooms, the plan had been to cut the number to 238, but the plan now is for 258 rooms in the renovated hotel, he said.

Frew repeated that the cost to refurbish a particular room depends on the hotel's new brand. The plan, though, is to remove nearly everything from the rooms down to the concrete floors and exterior walls and interior walls. Restoring everything from the floor and walls up could cost $15,200 a room, he said.

Bathroom sinks may stay as may bathtubs, though the tubs will need to be “replated,” he said.