The Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel — one of the city’s biggest hotels and once a symbol of downtown’s reinvention as a tourism destination — is in foreclosure.

Court records show the 622-room hotel defaulted on a $71 million loan last fall while dealing with a host of problems, including broken boilers, malfunctioning elevators and a linen shortage.

“The Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, like many commercial real estate properties, has been affected by the challenging operating environment in Baltimore,” the hotel’s owner, the Buccini Pollin Group, said in a statement.

When it opened in 1988, the hotel, then known as the Stouffer Harborplace, capped a flurry of hotel construction downtown. It was the third and final piece of a mixed-use development that took up an entire city block on East Pratt Street and included a now-defunct mall called The Gallery and a 28-story office tower.

The complex was an extension of the Harborplace pavilions, which opened in 1980 to wild success. The Rouse Co. developed both projects and connected them via a sky bridge over Pratt Street.

Over time the enthusiasm for Baltimore’s festival marketplaces waned, and the Rouse Co. sold its downtown assets. In 2005, a California-based real estate investment trust bought the hotel, which had rebranded as the Renaissance Harborplace under Marriott International.

In July 2020, the Buccini Pollin Group, a real estate management company with headquarters in Maryland and Delaware, bought the hotel for $80 million — reportedly after a $20 million price cut caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Baltimore Business Journal, the company told investors it intended to sell the hotel five years later for $144.6 million.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, in September 2021, the Buccini Pollin Group borrowed $71 million against the hotel, a loan that matured three years later, court records show.

The lender, New York-based Torchlight Investors, agreed to extend the loan for a year, to October 2025. When that deadline passed, Torchlight decided to act.

In court documents, the investment firm said, during one weekend in September, all four of the hotel’s guest elevators stopped working. The next month, two broken boilers left rooms without heat, forcing the hotel to refund guests. Recently, the hotel ended its relationship with the Marriott sales team, causing future bookings to decline.

Given the operational issues and the recent struggles of other Baltimore hotels, Torchlight said it feared the Renaissance Baltimore could shut down.

Torchlight asked a Baltimore Circuit Court judge to put a third party company in control to operate the Renaissance Baltimore temporarily. Court records show a judge approved that request in December.

The Buccini Pollin Group said in a statement that it’s been working “collaboratively and in good faith with the lender.”

The Renaissance Baltimore is not the only downtown hotel struggling. The city-owned Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor has been bleeding money for years, and the Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel closed this year.

Compared to other metropolitan areas, Baltimore’s hotel market has been struggling, said Didio Pequeno, director of hospitality market analytics for CoStar, a commercial real estate information company.

“Downtown Baltimore is what’s really dragging down performance,” Pequeno said.

Over the last year in downtown Baltimore, hotel occupancy rates have declined 6% and the revenue generated per hotel room has dipped 7.5%, he said. Nationwide, these figures have been relatively flat, according to Pequeno.

Other cities are facing similar challenges post-COVID, as international tourism declines, fewer large conferences take place and companies pull back on business trips, Pequeno said.

But there is hope for a rebound in Baltimore, he added.

Even though the city didn’t win a bid to host games for the 2026 World Cup, Baltimore will benefit from a surge of international tourism to the East Coast, Pequeno said, and then there’s Sail 250 in late June.

That’s when a fleet of international tall ships will arrive in Baltimore in celebration of America’s 250th birthday.

“Baltimore will most likely have a much better summer this year,” he said. “We expect this summer to be pretty strong.”