A piece of Downtown Los Angeles history has a new owner. Hotel Per La, the 241-room hotel occupying the landmark Giannini Building at 7th and Olive streets, sold this month for $34 million to tech entrepreneur and real estate investor Daniel Negari, founder of the domain registry company XYZ.com.
The building itself is the real story. Completed in 1923 and designed by the noted architecture firm Morgan, Walls & Clements, the 12-story tower originally served as the Los Angeles headquarters of Amadeo Giannini’s Bank of Italy, the institution that would later become Bank of America. Its neoclassical lobby, with Doric columns, marble floors, bronze doors, and an ornate coffered ceiling, sat empty for nearly two decades after the bank moved out before developers gave it new life as a hotel, first as NoMad Los Angeles in 2018 and, after a pandemic-era closure, as Hotel Per La in 2022.
Negari, who has been steadily building a Southern California hospitality and commercial real estate portfolio that includes properties in West Hollywood and San Diego, financed the purchase with roughly $25 million from Bank of America and plans to keep the property flying Marriott’s flag under a new 20-year Autograph Collection agreement. A new name for the hotel hasn’t been announced yet.
For Los Angeles business owners, deals like this are worth watching beyond the real estate headlines. Downtown LA’s hotel sector has been through a rough stretch, with several properties changing hands out of financial distress over the past couple of years. When an investor is willing to put roughly $40 million total into a single historic property, including furnishings and a full renovation budget, it signals a degree of confidence that the neighborhood’s foot traffic, tourism, and convention business will keep recovering. More hotel rooms and steady occupancy downtown tend to ripple outward to the restaurants, retailers, and service businesses that depend on visitor spending in the Financial District and Historic Core.
It’s also a reminder of how much adaptive reuse has reshaped Downtown LA over the past decade. Old bank towers, department stores, and office buildings across the core have been converted into hotels, apartments, and mixed-use spaces, and each conversion changes the mix of customers available to nearby small businesses. Owners operating near these projects may want to keep an eye on construction timelines and reopening dates, since a freshly renovated hotel next door can mean a real, if gradual, bump in walk-in traffic.
Source: Hoodline
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