“The response has been overwhelming,” he said. “We had 60 walk-ins that Saturday night.” The 159-room Hotel Via, at 138 King St. in Mission Bay, is the first new full-service hotel to open in San Francisco since February 2008, when the 550-room Intercontinental opened next door to Moscone West. It’s the first boutique hotel to premiere since Hotel Vitale across from the Ferry Building was completed in 2005. But it’s not going to be the last new hotel to open in 2017, or even this summer. After a long drought, San Francisco is in the midst of a mini-wave of five hotel openings. On Aug. 14, Proper Hotels will open the 131-room San Francisco Proper at 45 McAllister St., the first in a chain that will include hotels in Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Austin, Texas. Toward the end of the year, two more hotels will open: the 196-room Virgin Hotel at 250 Fourth St. and the 203-room Yotel at 1095 Market St. In early 2018, Mission Bay will get a second new hotel, a Marriott across Mission Creek from China Basin that will have 250 rooms. In contrast to the convention-oriented behemoths that opened in the 1980s and 1990s — the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, opened in 1989, has 1,362 rooms — the new hotels are smaller and focused on tapping into the neighborhood vibrancy that makes the city so popular with tech workers, rather than Moscone Convention Center business. “If you look at the brands coming in, they weren’t around five years ago and they are locating in places where a lot of tech firms are located,” said John Reyes, chief sales officer for the San Francisco Travel Association. “These properties are all about the next generation of traveler and really support what defines San Francisco as a center of innovation and tech.” The San Francisco Proper, built in the historic flatiron shell of the old Shaw Hotel, will probably have the biggest neighborhood impact. With four eating and drinking venues, including a rooftop bar, the hotel could transform a…