Downtown St. Paul property owners have added hotel rooms in recent years, but it’s rare when an entirely new hotel is built from the ground up.

That could soon change. A little more than a week ago, an ownership group associated with St. Paul-based PAK Properties and the Halverson-Blaiser Group sold a parking lot near Mears Park to the Raymond Group of Middleton, Wis. for $2.6 million.

The intent is to build a 180-unit hotel, most likely associated with the brand SpringHill Suites by Marriott. A call to the developer was not returned Tuesday.

The Raymond Group has developed hotel properties throughout the country, including the Courtyard by Marriott in Moorhead, Minn., and the Hampton Inn and Suites in Rochester, Minn. They have not submitted a request to the city for any form of public subsidy.

The open-air lot, at the northeast corner of Seventh and Jackson streets, has been owned by Rich Pakonen and partners for about three or four years.

“I’ve sold the land to those entities for the purpose of them being a hotel,” said Pakonen on Tuesday. “We’ve been working on it for a while.”

A 160-room Hampton Inn and Suites opened in the fall of 2016 on West Seventh Street, near the Xcel Energy Center, the site of a former Ace Hardware store.