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The lender to the Dossier Hotel has filed for judicial foreclosure on the property, seeking $68 million in unpaid principal and interest, another sign that downtown Portland’s struggling economy and real estate market have yet to hit bottom.
Wilmington Trust, acting on behalf of Dossier’s debt holders, filed the foreclosure document in Multnomah County Circuit Court on June 11. Dossier’s owner stopped making interest payments in September 2023, the complaint says.
The Dossier is part of Provenance Hotels, the chain founded by Gordon Sondland, who served as ambassador to the European Union during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Sondland sold Provenance to Pyramid Global Hospitality, based in The Woodlands, Texas, for an undisclosed price in 2022. Sondland remains chairman of Provenance Hotels, according to the company’s website.
Once a healthy market for boutiques like the Dossier, Portland became a hotel graveyard during the pandemic, when people stopped traveling and George Floyd protests and riots prompted businesses to nail plywood over whole blocks of storefronts.
“Borrower has defaulted under the Loan Documents due to its failure to, among other things, pay to lender, when and in the full amounts due, monthly principal and interest payments as set forth in the loan documents,” Wilmington Trust said in its complaint.
Portland Hotel LLC, the entity that owns the Dossier, according to county records, borrowed $58.5 million from German American Capital Corp. in July 2015, the complaint says. At the time, entities controlled by Sondland and his Provenance Hotel mini-chain owned the Heathman Hotel, the Sentinel, the Woodlark, Hotel Lucia, Hotel deLuxe and Dossier.
Neither the Dossier nor Provenance returned messages seeking comment.
Sondland, who attended the University of Washington before dropping out to sell commercial real estate, started his hotelier career in 1985, when he bought the bankrupt Roosevelt Hotel in Seattle, according to Fortune magazine. He raised cash for the purchase by tapping friends and family, the magazine reported.
Sondland forayed into Portland in 2001, when he opened the Hotel Lucia.
He became a one-man cause célèbre in 2019 when he appeared as a witness in the U.S. Senate’s impeachment of Trump for allegedly withholding military aid from Ukraine to force President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into Hunter Biden, who had business in the country.
The Senate acquitted Trump on Feb. 5, 2020. Two days later, Trump fired Sondland as ambassador to the European Union. Sondland had testified that he and Rudolph Giuliani worked at Trump’s “express direction” to arrange a deal whereby Ukraine agreed to investigate Biden in exchange for a visit to the White House.
