Graduate Hotels

“And this was actually, you know, why we ended up selling graduate was we took a, you know, a very large, expensive loan out during COVID to, you know, continue to execute, to deliver the projects, continue to pay our mortgages, and, you know, we made it throug…”

“In 2020, we had 4600 rooms, and the portfolio did seventy two million dollars. Your start, we opened, you know, 15 hotels. We had another 15, 17 under development.”

“Yeah, corporate, we had a lot of layoffs. The property levels, we had a massive amount of layoffs. I think we laid off 2000 people out of the, I think, 2200 at the time.”

“There was so much going on in these culturally rich, inspirational markets in the summer that we were way busier in the summer than we were in the winter.”

“99% luck.”

“We were going to become vertically integrated. We're going to own the hotel. We were going to operate the hotel. And we were going to brand the hotel. So We controlled the full customer journey and experience everything that a customer would touch, see, feel w…”

“I mean, there, you know, if there wasn't COVID, if there were, we wouldn't be having, we'd be talking about us selling the entire portfolio, you know, over a two billion dollar portfolio of real estate. That'd be the conversation, you know, and the brand, or m…”

“It's the idea that people take very passionate ownership of where they went to school or where they're from, and the hotel product was terrible, and no one had done it. I was like, why anybody done it? Why hadn't somebody built a brand? There's all these brand…”

“The challenge as you grew bigger was to think smaller and find more stories and more history and more nostalgia and create, you know, we get this term nostalgia. You create a new memory in an old place that you'd already been that felt familiar.”