Check out who's checking in: 3 newcomers may enter Scarborough's red-hot hotel market
Provided / Town of Scarborough, LaBella Associates
A rendering of the 110-room LivAway Suites, under construction at 83 Mussey Road in Scarborough.
With shovels in the ground for a 110-room lodging — and two other properties in planning stages — Scarborough is becoming a hotel hotspot.
If built as proposed, the three projects will add a total of 383 hotel rooms within the Portland suburb. That's a 59% increase over the 650 or so rooms already there, spread among a dozen hotels.
The newcomers will also be some of the largest hotels in Scarborough, a town of 71 square miles and 22,000 people.
LivAway Suites, a Utah-based chain of extended-stay budget hotels, said Tuesday it has begun foundation work on a four-story, 110-room hotel at 83 Mussey Road.
In June, the Scarborough Planning Board reviewed a sketch for a larger hotel — five stories, 160 rooms — that would be built on a vacant lot at 289 Payne Road. The project is being proposed by an affiliate of New Gen, which runs five hotels in South Portland including a TownePlace Suites that launched in October. The Scarborough hotel would operate under the Hampton Inn & Suites brand.
Not far away, in the Southborough business complex off Payne Road, Opechee Construction has made plans for a 113-room hotel. That project received planning board approval last year, but has yet to break ground.
The addition of the three hotels would bring the number of rooms in Scarborough to over 1,000, and would represent a substantial portion of the roughly 6,000 in Greater Portland.
Breaking ground in more than one way
The LivAway Suites property is the company's first in New England. In fact, the Scarborough hotel is one of LivAway's first in the country.
The Salt Lake City company launched just last year and has not yet opened a single hotel. But LivAway is scheduled to open one Aug. 5 in West Jordan, Utah, and another is due to debut Oct. 8 in Smyrna, Tenn. Both are already booking reservations.
The company said in a news release it has broken ground on eight hotels over the last 11 months, and that it plans to begin work on nine more locations this year.
Hotels in more than 30 locations including Scarborough are described as "coming soon" on the LivAway website.
At one time, it appeared LivAway might be coming sooner to Scarborough. The project originally went to the Scarborough Planning Board in January 2023 with a proposal of 126 rooms. But some board members expressed concerns about the size of the building, how stormwater would be handled at the site, and the placement of an access road.
LivAway and its architects, LaBella Associates of Rochester, N.Y., modified plans over the course of more than a year and reduced the number of rooms to 110. Ultimately, the project went to the planning board five times before being approved this May.
But perhaps a little resistance is to be expected. In a news release, LivAway said it is "built on a foundation of 'for developers, by developers'" and that it will "disrupt the traditional hotel franchise model."
LivAway CEO Mike Nielson went on to explain the rationale for the Scarborough location.
"Our newest property in Scarborough will be built in close proximity to major employers — answering the high demand for affordable extended stay options," he said.
"We're eager to meet the needs of the growing influx of workers and families coming to the Portland metropolitan area, with our unique brand promise of offering guests everything they need and nothing they don't."
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