Data Analysis, Funding Strategy Support Capital Project on Grounds

UVAFinance’s work across Grounds can often be behind-the-scenes but sometimes it is front and center, such as right at the Emmet-Ivy entrance corridor.

A new hotel and conference center and the School of Data Science will anchor the 15-acre area to serve as a central point to University Grounds, as well as an entrance corridor for visitors to the University.

With any University capital project, UVAFinance is involved in helping manage the identified funding sources, such as state funding, cash reserves, gifts from donors, and debt.

“This project is unique in that it is direct revenue generating,” says UVA Treasurer Julie Richardson. “The hotel and conference center, when fully operational, will provide income through overnight lodging, meeting and event facilities, and food and beverage.”

With revenue generating projects, UVA Treasury looks at the projected timing and availability of revenues to access debt sources, in a strategic manner. The strategy is in analyzing cash flow for the business, consider asset operating costs, reserves and revenue assumptions.

 (Deborah Berke Partners/Hanbury Architects)

“This project took a lot of data analysis and evaluating a variety of loan structures,” Richardson says. “We carefully analyzed the type of debt we could access and calculated the projected revenue and timing to support the debt service.”Generally, UVAFinance is involved in identifying capital sources for building projects around the time that it is being developed to present to the Board of Visitors’ Building and Grounds Committee. Richardson and team run scenarios on sequencing and sizing of multiple funding sources. This information helps leadership make decisions on the financial structuring of projects.

In 2021, the Board of Visitors approved the designs for the state-of-the-art, 223,000-square-foot hotel and conference center.

“Construction timing of all capital projects is important, but it was even more so with the hotel and conference center building,” Richardson explains. “We developed a timeline on when we expect specific revenue and how the loans would be structured. Essentially, we are making an investment that we want to benefit the entire University Community.”

The hotel construction is estimated to be completed by spring 2025 with an opening planned for later in the summer. The hotel and conference center will be open to the public and will facilitate University events and gatherings. The 214-room hotel also will offer approximately 25,000 square feet of conference center space and provide the University convenient, centrally located accommodations for visiting scholars and lecturers, prospective faculty members and students, returning alumni, career recruiters and other visitors.