Five years ago, the land now labeled as 905 Seventh St. in Sacramento, California, was nothing more than a parking lot for light rail commuters. Today, it's home to the city's newest major hotel.
The AC Hotel Sacramento opened in March 2024 after its construction began in January 2022. Downtown Sacramento has been in desperate need of more hotel rooms, and the AC Hotel's arrival helped fill that demand, economic leaders in California's capital city said.
The hotel sits in an opportunity zone, which is land that developers are given extra tax incentives from the federal government to revitalize.
The AC Hotel created temporary jobs during construction and, since its completion, has drawn more visitors. The Marriott-franchised property was one of the largest hotels to open last year, second only to the Chicken Ranch Casino Resort in Jamestown, California. The AC Hotel has left such a big mark on the city that the building earned a 2025 CoStar Impact Award for commercial property of the year for Sacramento, as selected by an independent panel of local industry professionals.
Marriott franchises more than a dozen other AC hotels in California and roughly 150 of them around the world.
About the project: When building the hotel, construction crews discovered that the soil below the former parking lot could not support a stable foundation. To fix the issue, workers undertook an expensive and time-consuming process of driving concrete columns 70 feet into the ground, thus helping create the hotel's base. The construction effort also included building an underground driveway and valet parking area.
The hotel — which has a restaurant and fitness center — has 179 rooms stretched across eight floors. The building is convenient for professional basketball fans because it's one block away from Golden 1 Center, the home court of the NBA's Sacramento Kings. Rocklin-based Tricorp Group was the general contractor, and the architects were Axis Architecture and Design of San Francisco.
What the judges said: "Downtown Sacramento is in need of new hotel rooms and the AC Hotel rightly has set an impressive standard for quality and ingenuity in both construction/financing and execution," said Troels Adrian, the executive vice president of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council. "Hopefully this example will be followed by many more."
"The AC Hotel project transformed an underutilized surface parking lot adjacent to a Sacramento Regional Transit light rail station into a 179-key hotel, which helps address a critical shortage of hotel room inventory in our central city," said Scott Ford, the economic development director for the Downtown Sacramento Partnership. "The project will yield high taxable revenue per acre and support job creation in the hospitality sector and represents the type of location-efficient development we need to prioritize for regional sustainability."
They made it happen: Peachtree CEO Greg Friedman led the team of developers, which included Peachtree's Chief Financial Officer Jatin Desai, Principal Mitul Patel and Vice President of Investments Will Woodworth. Tim Wilson, a principal at Blackridge Group, and Rohit Ranchhod, the CEO of American Hospitality Services, were co-developers. Financing came from Western Alliance Bank and its managing director, James Petty.