They wanted to buy the hotel, but I believe they ended up just buying a few condos instead. The reason they wanted the hotel is because Ameriprise has 20-30 employees from out of town in on a daily basis that need to stay at a hotel. They also have multiple training conferences throughout the year where they bring in 50-100 employees for about a week. They could easily occupy half of the annual rooms of the IVY just with their employees.Did they want to buy the rooms, or the unsold condos? I cannot remember how that all went down.I would imagine WF would also want to use some hotel rooms for business travelers to their offices. I'm not sure how many rooms they'd need, but Ameriprise wanted to buy all of the Ivy hotel rooms for that purpose.
Having worked at the Grand Hotel (a 150 room hotel) for years, we always has 10-20 guests per night in town for business with Wells Fargo. Multiply that number by the other 3-4 hotels within a two block radius of the Wells Fargo tower and you get a pretty large number. Wells Fargo could negotiate a really nice contract with this new hotel which would guarantee occupancy x number of rooms a year. While we'd like to think that the new stadium would be a key factor in the success of the hotel, it really isn't.