New hotel proposed in south Concord

A four-story hotel has been proposed for south Concord amid a host of auto dealers and auto businesses.

Key Auto Group is proposing the 116-room hotel alongside the Key Collision Center at 94-98 Manchester Street. Key Auto Group is owned by Anthony DiLorenzo, a Portsmouth businessman who is running for Congress as a Republican in the 1st District. The auto group has 20 dealerships and 11 collision centers around the state.

Key Auto Group bought the 11-acre property in 2015 with the then-stated objective of building an auto business and moved Key Collision Center there, leaving much of the property open. DiLorenzo said Thursday that he’s gone forward with a hotel because of a lack of suitable auto-dealer candidates and after a feasibility study indicated that Concord “has room for another hotel.”

The proposal is slated to be heard by the Planning Board on May 20.

If built, this would be the first new hotel in Concord since the Hotel Concord opened in 2019, although two hotels have been redone since then: Days Inn was replaced by Tru in 2020, and the Holiday Inn became Doubletree in 2025.

Concord has around 800 hotel rooms at the moment. No hard data exists on hotel room numbers among New Hampshire communities, said Mike Somers, president of the New Hampshire Lodging & Restaurant Association, but Concord’s market appears solid.

“Since the Concord hotel market is quite stable, I believe the current number of rooms is about right. There may be some room for growth in the coming years as the economy improves,” he wrote in an email responding to Monitor questions. “What I would say is that every hotel that is built does a feasibility study to see what the market conditions are like.”

Like much of the national economy, the hotel industry is in what is known as a K-shaped pattern right now, meaning that the high-end and luxury segment is doing well – represented by the leg of the letter K pointing upward – but lower-priced segments are not, represented by the K leg pointing down.

Revenue per room, the industry’s most important metric, rose 4.2% for luxury hotels last year but fell for all other categories, according to analyst firm PWC, with economy hotels doing the worst. The firm’s year-end analysis says leisure travel is expected to increase in 2026 but corporate travel and business bookings, a large part of Concord’s market, will be “slower to rebound.”

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