While the joint venture will own the hotel, it will be operated by a major hotel group to be named later, officials said. Singapore-based Pontiac Land Group will develop the hotel space, which would include around 200 rooms. That’s a “small percentage” of the roughly 6,000 hotel rooms in Rochester, said Jeffrey Bolton, the Mayo Clinic’s chief administrative officer.

“We have heard from our patients the need for this type of hotel offering within the Rochester community,” Bolton said. “If you look around the country at our top academic medical center competitors, most of them located in large cities, there are premier hotels — a number of them — very close and in many cases on the campus of those other organizations. So, we feel this type of offering is really critical in our efforts to compete for domestic and international patients that are willing to travel to Mayo Clinic to receive their care.”

Pontiac Land Group is not asking for public funding for the project, said Lisa Clarke, executive director of the nonprofit Destination Medical Center (DMC) Economic Development Agency. Backed by $585 million in taxpayer money, the 20-year DMC initiative is supporting private development in the Rochester area near Mayo Clinic through investments in public infrastructure, Clarke said.

One of the DMC investments thus far supports a hotel being built near Broadway Plaza, an apartment building in downtown Rochester that Clarke said currently stands as the city’s tallest.

“The Gonda Building is not the tallest today, but with this expansion of approximately 11 floors it will be the tallest building in Rochester to-date,” she said. “It really complements the hospitality offerings that we have in this community right now. … Our initial research showed that we do have a need for hotel rooms.”

Earlier this month, Mayo Clinic announced a $648 million expansion for its medical center in Arizona plus $144 million worth of capital projects at its hospital in Jacksonville, Fla.