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A
Welcome to Real Talk Real Estate discussions with Andrew Kirsch. In each episode, Andrew interviews industry leaders. We'll hear their real time opinions on today's market, their background and unique career highlights and guidance for newcomers to the industry. You can find this show at www.sklarkirsch.com and on YouTube, LinkedIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts and more. Now here's the host, Real Talk Andrew Kir.
B
Welcome to episode four of the Real Talk where I interview Vomsi Banala, founder of Arbor Lodging. Arbor Lodging is a Chicago based hotel operator focusing on select service hotels throughout the country. In this episode you will hear how Vomsy took a gamble, left a comfortable job as a lawyer at a global law firm to start a real estate company. During the great financial cris focusing on hotels, Arbor has become one of the best in class portfolio owners of select service hotels. Now let's go to my conversation with Vomsee. All right, I'm here with Vamsi Ban Thala, the CEO of Arbor Lodging Partners. Vomsee, welcome to Real Talk. It's a real pleasure to have you.
C
Thanks for having me.
B
So, Vomsee, you know what, I don't say this lightly, but you're my hero. And the reason why you're my hero is because like me, or I should say like you, you are a member of the bar. You were a lawyer, but then your path went a lot different than my path. And you, I think are what every lawyer tries to be. At least every real estate lawyer tries to be. And that's a principle of a very successful real estate company. So tell us about your background and how did you become co founder of Arbor?
C
Yeah, look, I mean, I think it is a dream. Sometimes I wonder if I chose correctly when it's like when everything is coming down on me. But, but no, jokes aside, it's been a lot of fun. Yeah. So my background was I started as an attorney in New York about almost 20 years ago, which is kind of crazy. And I coming out of college I was pretty certain or I wasn't certain what I wanted to do. So I was thinking about consulting, investment banking, decided to kind of put off life a little bit more and went straight into law school. And so once graduating from law school, I got into the practice. I loved the deal making side. I loved being busy. I liked all of that stuff. But I was working crazy hours, as, you know, we're all accustomed to. I was working at a big firm in New York and like, you know, getting out at 10, 11 o' clock at night was a good night. And I think in some ways it was. It was just escapism, to be honest, of just like, thinking, like, what are some of some other things that could be thinking about doing? And, you know, one of my best friends from college, who I've actually known since high school, also lived in New York, and we used to always just talk about trying to do deals and figuring out what it would be like. And frankly, a lot of it was just fun and pie in the sky. And I think you just started to get some momentum and kind of two things came together. One, we. It was pre GFC so guys like me could get a loan. Is always my running joke that I was able to just say, like, hey, we want to get in this space. And we just got support from a couple of investors. I had partners from my law firm, I had MDs from clients of mine. We passed a hat around and we were able to get a small deal going. You know, really, we didn't know anything about the space. We knew we wanted to do something in real estate. At the end of the day, hotels being an operating business, we were able to buy at a price point that made sense versus just trying to have the lowest cost of capital. And sometimes, like, even when I reflect back on it, I just realized how many things had to all align at the same time to come together. But found a deal, raised some money and got our first deal done. And second deal came together and we felt like, hey, if we're going to give it a shot, this is the time to do it. I wasn't married yet and didn't have kids yet, and so figured, hey, worst case scenario, I could be a lawyer again, and gave it a go. And we had a couple of really good years. In 0607 08, we just sort of felt like, wow, this is easy. We're the smartest guys in the world. And then everything melted around us. And frankly, it got so bad, I couldn't have even gotten back to being a lawyer at that point because no one was hiring. So I just had to figure it out. And so here we are. And so it's been a fun ride.
B
Absolutely. I mean, definitely. It's a testament to you and to your fortitude of, you know, launching a real estate company literally at the peak of the market in 06, and then quickly, within a year or two, seeing the depths of the market. That must have been a shock. And were you having second thoughts of, gosh, you know, here you were getting a check every two weeks at a, at a New York law firm and now, you know, not understanding or not knowing when you were able to, to get compensated or if you were going to get compensated. And what was, what was that feeling like?
C
Yeah, well, as my wife often jokes, she goes, I got engaged to a big law attorney and I married a quote unquote entrepreneur, which meant that I had no money. And so look, I always had the entrepreneurial bug. I knew I wanted to do something at some point. I don't know if I necessarily knew I would have the opportunity to do it as like my full time gig. I think I always knew I'd probably try to invest in stuff on the side. I just like to talk about deals and how to create value. And so I think that there's just a certain energy sometimes just naivete that comes with being young and having ideas. And I'm glad that I just kind of ran with that. And I think part of it was like, I never quit being an attorney. In my mind, I still am very focused on risk adjusted approaches to things. And I don't think I. Even when we left to start the business, I didn't just leave with an idea and say, hey, I'm going to figure this out. I basically worked two jobs for over a year until I felt like, okay, we might know what we're doing here. We got a deal closed now let's give it a go. And it'll be a huge pay cut, but at least it's not jumping into nothing and just figuring it out. And so certainly when await came around, it was a scary time. And I think on the good side is I was pretty young and didn't really have a lot of, you know, overhead. And so that definitely didn't become like a big issue or a big risk. And like I said, by that point I was married. And so we still at least had like 1, 1 salary coming in. But that is part of the scar tissue, I think, that comes with being an entrepreneur. You got to go through those moments effectively, which makes you more successful. So I look back on it and I realize how much we grew and how much better we got at our business, how much better I got a leader. But it certainly wasn't fun going through it at the time.
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's being an entrepreneur. For me it was, you know, starting my own law firm, but it's still within the legal industry and it focused on, on real estate, at least for me. And, and so to, to look at guys like yourself who's pivoting it takes, you know, a lot of risk because there's a lot of comfort being at a big law firm, but obviously a lot more satisfying when you're able to see the fruits of your, of your labor. So talk about where, what is Arbor Lodging? You know, how large are you, how many employees, how many assets or how assets under management do you have? Give the audience some background on the company.
C
Yeah. So Arbor Lodging is a vertically integrated owner operator of hotels. We have just shy of 40 hotels nationally. Everything from select service up into boutique. And by being vertically integrated, we both own and operate these hotels. So in the first few years, I'd say about the first five years or six years, my partner Sheenal and myself did everything. Again, neither one of us came from an operating background. So we were learning as we went and we were sort of there to make these decisions together. And I would say after about year five or six, we finally started to get something going and it just became clear we had to take our lead on different verticals. And so Sheenal runs Arbologing Management, which is our operating arm. It manages our portfolio as well as some third party management. And I run Arbor Lodging Partners, which is our investment arm. So that's both on the acquisition side as well as capital markets and asset management. In many ways that's just kind of a branding of the verticals. It's all one company. We absolutely benefit from being under one roof and working. The entire team works together. Sheenal and I have always had the same office and work together in the same office. In fact, the space we're in now is the first time we have that a wall is between us, but it's a collapsible wall and it's glass. And so, you know, for example, when the height of COVID hit, that wall went down because we were talking non stop the entire time. And so to us that's really how we approach the business, how we think about it and how we think we make better decisions. And so we have also since then, while hotels are the core of what we do, we have also kind of got into a couple of new verticals where we just started a new vertical called Arlo Residential which focused on multifamily. Our first deal that we just launched on that front is we bought a 450 room hotel that we're converting to 331 apartment units. And we're looking for more opportunities on the hotel side as well as what we anticipate is going to be a big opportunity on the office side, not as Easy to do, but a much larger sample set to work with. And then we. We've done some stuff on the debt side before, both as rescue investments, but more importantly, particularly during the gfc, we bought a lot of debt. That's really how we effectively stayed in business. So this time around, we've been actually looking at originating some loans. So we're currently underwriting some opportunities on that front as well.
B
That's great. Wayne, going back, I want to get your perspective on where the market is today, you know, in the fourth quarter of 2022. And before we do that, give the audience just a. A flavor of you go from one deal in 2006, it's your first deal. You. You know, the hotel business is not for the faint of heart. And how do you essentially convince investors. How do you convince a lender to provide you capital on your first deal?
C
Yeah, so on the first deal on the equity side, it was truly just like going around and taking small checks from, like, $25,050,000 investments, a couple a little bit larger, but. But it's not like we had one anchor investor that drove it for us. It was absolutely friends and family. And frankly, it's not because of the deal, and it wasn't because of the opportunity. It was really just because of us. And that's where I think in the early days, cultivating relationships and just hopefully building trust in yourself, in everything else that you do, can lead you into other opportunities. And so I still remember seeing an email chain between a partner that I worked with and one of our clients, and they forwarded it to me to be like, hey, we're in. We're gonna. We're both gonna invest. And I read down the chain, and they both were like, I know nothing about hotels, and I don't think Bumpsy knows anything about hotels, but he's. He's a good dude, and we're will like, we should back him. And like, that's really what drove it. Right. They just felt like they could trust me and that they knew that I was going to bend over backwards to try to make it work, and I was gonna throw myself into it. And so that's really how it starts. And frankly, I don't know how there could be another way, at least from the where. Where I came from, because if I had gone out there and tried to claim that I was a hotel expert, it would have just been a lie. And so I. I don't think anybody was expecting that. I. I tried to mitigate for that. I brought in third party Management, I brought on some other, you know, a couple of the investors had hotel background. So there was a way to say, hey, there's a working group here that we can lean on. But at the end of the day, I, I kind of owned what they were investing in, which was, you're just going to invest in a guy that's going to work really hard.
B
Yeah, I was going to say that we invest, me personally and our firm invests with a lot of clients of ours. And people will ask me, well, how do you underwrite your deals? How do you know about, I don't know, real estate in Austin or Dallas or Salt Lake? Well, I'm not going to see the properties. I trust the sponsors, and I'm betting on jockeys, not the horses. And I have a good feeling as to, is this person diligent, conscientious, always will do the right thing with respect to their investors money, and then it just sort of mushrooms from there in terms of the relationship and the trust.
C
Absolutely. And I mean, I can even fast forward that later in my career to Covid, which was absolutely kind of the worst thing to ever hit hotels. And at the end of the day, we, we had investors who are in deals with us that got clobbered by Covid, that re upped with us on new deals after that. And it's not because of track record, because those deals certainly have been impaired. It's because they effectively said, we like the way that you handled yourself during the worst of times. Back was against the wall, you were always available, you always picked up the phone, you were transparent, you talked about where the challenges were, you talked about where the opportunity was. And that's all you can hope for at the end of the day. And frankly, we look at the same thing when you reverse it, because in the early days, it's all about the money and you're just so thankful that somebody's willing to invest with you. But when you especially think about something like hotels, it's an expert driven field and we dedicated 16 years at this point to being experts. That along the way the table does turn a little bit because the capital becomes a commodity and they need people that they trust that knows the industry that they can believe in. And the way we choose our investors at this point is not just because it's a dollar, because there's lots of places that can come from. I think about the fact that I'm like, all right, when things get bad, when there's another Covid, who do I want to be a partner with? Because if you're the type of guy that's going to just start blaming everybody and trying to figure out how to, you know, save yourself, that's not a good partnership. Right. If you're like, all right, how are we going to work through this together? That's the type of guy we want to be in business with.
B
So how are you capitalizing deals these days still? Through syndication model or more joint venture model, where an institution or a family office is providing you with the vast majority of the equity?
C
Yeah, so for the last few years, it's all been institutional capital, I would say. You know, our trajectory, which probably matches a lot of what other, you know, real estate investors have done, is in the early days, it was syndications. So individual investors. I pivoted away from that model partly because you could probably make the argument that the economics might be a little bit better for somebody like myself, but it is a lot of work to herd the cats, and there's always some execution risk that someone's going to back out. And again, we didn't start with a big balance sheet, so it's not like I could backfill it myself. Then as soon as we could sort of shift from that, it was worth it to us. It was also somewhat forced upon us because once the GFC hit and we shifted to buying distress and buying debt, we had to show up at auctions and we had to move quickly that effectively, I shifted to finding some key investors for us that were willing to basically be our main partner. So kind of like family office type of investors. And then when the market stabilized and we started to do larger deals and move up the chain, then we started to bring in private equity partners and hedge funds.
B
So what were the conversations like with your joint venture partners around mid March to July of 2020?
C
So it's funny, in March, the first couple of calls, I'm picking it up and knowing that I have to bad news, cancellations are coming in and numbers are crazy and all this type of stuff. And I think this is a testament of why you spend a lot of time picking who your partners are. Some of the first calls were like, how are you doing? And I've always appreciated that. Like, nobody went straight to asking about, what does this mean for my pocketbook? They knew it was an incredibly stressful time to be a hotel owner and operator. And, you know, during that time, we had to do an immense amount of furloughs. We had, you know, we had a team that was like, do I have a job? Like, you know, the World was kind of falling apart around us and we were spending so much time on managing our team and making sure that they felt supported and trying to figure out what this all meant. And we were also trying to save deals that I was really appreciative of people asking just how we were doing. I think that just that that's always meant a lot to me. But those conversations, I think part of what made life a little easier during that time was that there was no boogeyman. Like, we hadn't screwed up, they hadn't screwed up. It was basically like, you know, it was a worldwide pandemic that got thrown on all of us. And so there was. It was very collaborative of like, hey, we gotta work through this together. But again, where I think that I was appreciative of what we had developed as a company and the reputation was that a lot of these guys were very deferential to us. They wanted to be in the loop, they wanted to hear what was going on. But when we showed them our analysis and we explained like, hey, we should throw, you know, some more money into this or we should go try to negotiate this with the lender, they often took our lead on it. But again, we, you know, in those early days, I woke up super early. I started an internal call. Then we were on calls all day with investors and lenders. Then I closed with an internal call. And then I generally poured myself a big glass of wine and then would start the day all over again the next day.
B
And probably not just one. And then I'm sure your wife reminded you you could have been at a large law firm getting a.
C
That's right.
B
So what in terms of navigating both, you know, government programs like PPP and having these relationships with, with your equity. What about the lenders were. Because, you know, we had. We represented quite a number of owner operator investors in the hotel industry across all asset classes. But specific to, To. To hotels. I mean, you know, you went from whatever your occupancy was at that time, 80, 90% to literally zero percent. Any, you know, any lenders try to be, you know, more aggressive than others. And, and what was your tactic?
C
Yeah, look, I think for the, for the most part, we had very good experiences with our lenders. And part of this is all just like also managing expectations. I know it's easy, for example, for like, people like to often be frustrated with servicers on CMBS loans and things like that, but we also went into that whole process fully aware of what they could do and couldn't do, and maybe that's part of my legal background and respect, like understanding that. But if you go in and think that, hey, we're just going to look at the facts, this is a horrible time you got to work with us, you're going to be disappointed. But if you know what they are able to do and what they're not able to do. We generally found servicers that were pretty responsive and wanted to work with us and, and as long as we were being good guys, they wanted to be good guys. I, you know, we certainly had an experience with one lender that was kind of used the same playbook this time around that they might have in any other situation that had gone wrong. And I think it was, you know, that was a little frustrating. But outside of that, I'd say for the most part we had lenders that really tried to work with us and saw that we were doing everything we could. And you know, frankly, everybody had to give a little bit too. Right? Like, as much as lenders had to work with us, we also were floating our, our properties and effectively giving financing and doing everything we could to support them. And so I think they appreciated that. You know, I was surprised to see like, in general, I think, like, not just our experience, but from what I heard from a lot of industry colleagues too, is that some of the, the big banks weren't as flexible as I think everybody thought they were going to be right when we went in. But they certainly weren't bad guys either. I just don't think that they really, you know, bending over backwards to make things work. But I'd say the other way that, you know, we had a couple of smaller deals that we had investment partners that weren't really able to step up and we effectively, you know, we as arbor stepped in and filled in gaps ourselves too, just because we sort of felt really comfortable with the deal and the situation and wanted to show that we were standing behind what we do.
B
Yeah, I mean, what's amazing to me, and we talk about it like, you know, look, it was only two, two and a half years ago, but it seems like it was years ago because quickly then you pivot to 20, 21 and I guess depending on the market and depending on the type of hotel, but all of a sudden hotels went from, you know, the stepchild of, of the real estate business in 2020 to one of the most successful performing asset classes within the real estate industry like no one has ever seen before. The occupancy revpar. Every metric was through the roof. So what was that like in 2021, now it's a buying frenzy. Cap rates coming down, prices at all time highs. What was that like 12 month shift like for your business? And what did you guys do in 2021? Heading into, you know, the first quarter or so, 2022, how active were you?
C
Yeah, it's a good question. So we had kind of two big things that we had to deal with and that sort of reflects the way we were built as an investor and an operator. So starting with the ladder first, the demand came back so fast so strongly. I felt like we spent a lot of the year trying to hire people and trying always playing from behind because of course guests were then disappointed they'd come in and they couldn't get certain things. And we were just trying to survive because we, you know, we brought in five people for a job that normally would have taken 15 people. And so that was the number one stress on our team was just spending a lot of time. Now look, we would always step back and say this is a good problem to have. We just remember a year ago how bad things were. So this is a good issue. People want to be in our hotel. But it was absolutely a lot on the team to be navigating through that process. And I know, I'm sure you were a guest at plenty of hotels that you were probably like, man, I'm paying a lot and I can't believe this is the service that I'm getting. On the investment side, I think that we, I'm really happy with like the way we stayed active and the way that we pulled back. So I think we pretty quickly saw that once we saw that the world wasn't totally falling apart, we had hit the bottom. We felt our feet under us. We, we did some rescue capital deals where that window was kind of small, but there was opportunities where people needed working capital or to pay down some debt or whatever it is. And then we, we really just shifted and said, look, we've got super cheap debt out there, we're starting a new cycle and there's opportunities to go buy hotels right now. And so we ended up buying five hotels in the course of about a year. All slightly different strategies, but super excited about all of them. And to be honest, I thought we were going to end up doing that for another year or two. And basically our last deal closed in May. And then the cycle closed, like just, you know, capital markets started to go a little wonky. So we didn't end up really being like, there just started to be a bit aspirated difference. But frankly, we were already falling behind. I'd say by, you know, the deals we closed in 22, we'd actually locked up in 21. And we felt good about those terms. But by the time we got into late 21 and started looking at deals in early 22, we were so far off of where pricing was. And we were always certain that we would get another call and say, okay, where are you guys? And we never got that call. There was always somebody that was buying and paying those numbers. And so this is like one of the parts of being an investor that you don't necessarily think about, that you learn over time, is that it is really uncomfortable to not make the bid when you know you have the ability to execute. And, and you just have to tell yourself, like, this pricing feels really aggressive. And, and when it does, like if it turns right away, like right now, we feel good about it. But when there's a course of six months, nine months in between that, you keep losing deals, of course, you start to doubt yourself a little bit and you say, man, are we being too conservative? Did we screw up the under. I feel good about where we stopped on our pricing. Now. I think they're clearly. We're clearly in the middle of a larger scale asset repricing. And I think that where we bought deals, I feel good about. I think that if we had really leaned in on the later part of that kind of mini cycle we just went through, I would be sweating it a little bit more.
B
Yeah. And I know we're a little short on time, so I just want to ask is one last question or two. And that's where we are today. And you know, I was in Chicago this past week for a conference and, you know, it takes a podcast with someone from Chicago where instead of doing it live, I went back to L. A to then interview you and Zoom World.
C
Right. Yeah.
B
With you in Chicago. But, you know, the sentiment across 200 principles, across all asset classes, it's not good. And, you know, liquidity is drying up and the concern of, of even more interest rate hikes over the next three to six months. There's. We're not going to be back at 2008 great financial crisis, or at least I don't think anyone thinks it's going to be like that. And it's not going to be 0% occupancy like, you know, the first several months of COVID But we're in a, in a, in a very interesting, precarious time and so curious to hear your thoughts as to what Arbor's perspective is and what you plan to do both in the next three to six months, but also maybe even sort of medium term for the next 12 to 18 months. How are you guys pivoting your company?
C
Yeah, so I would share that sentiment. I'm certainly concerned about what we're seeing from a capital market standpoint. Not that I don't think it needs to be done. I do think we have to get inflation under control. And unfortunately, unfortunately, we really only have blunt instruments to do that. But in many ways, if you, if you go back to 2019 and I looked at deals we closed in 2019 and even into early 2020 before COVID and we basically had like flat growth rates or in some cases, like almost thought numbers could go backwards a little bit because we were in the late part of a cycle and we knew that there was going to have to be some sort of tightening and that that was going to result, have a result on, on what people could pay and what performance would look like. All of that got sidestepped because of COVID but I think in many ways we're on the other side of that and now we're just reckoning with what had to happen. Anyway, we knew that there was going to be an increase on rates and that automatically is going to have an impact on values. So the dichotomy that we operate in today is at the property level, things are as good as they've been in over two years and each month they're getting a little bit better and we're feeling more stable, we're producing cash. It's a good story there on the capital market side. On the deal side, it looks very bleak and we are not making any deals work right now. It feels like even if we hit the bid on anything, that we're basically paying the peak price of the last cycle when we should really be looking at what the new pricing looks like. And so frankly, I don't see us really being very active on just like traditional acquisitions in the near term. I think we're going to be looking at like special situation type of stuff where it's like preferred equity or some sort of distressed deal that is timing constrained, maturity strained. I mentioned that we were looking to originate debt. That whole thesis and business plan really got going back in April, May for us because we anticipated something like this was going to happen and we felt like there is going to be better returns on the debt side than effectively going into the equity and not being properly compensated for it. So the way we sort of see this cycle playing out because again, this is how it generally happens. Covid was a weird cycle. The cycle happening now tends to follow More of what's happened in the past in our mind is that in the early days you're going to see some opportunity on originating debt. Spreads will finally come in. SOFR curve will settle down a little bit overall cost of debt will come in, but there's probably going to be some distressed opportunities that we can then start to buy either loans or maturity defaults or REOs or whatever it is. And then there's going to be a new cycle that starts where we can start buying at a basis that sounds really attractive to us with financing that makes sense. I don't know how like what the timing of that cycle looks like, but I think that's what it looks like because it genuine generally usually looks like that. And I'd say today we're in the early innings of that where you're in the stages of where people aren't selling if they don't have to, but at some point they're going to. There's going to be maturities. There's like if somebody has a maturity next year and the there's a new value and the new loan is based on a new ltv, there's going to be a gap and all we can hope for is it in the interim that we don't have income drop also because that's also going to impact value. And so I think that there's going to be some things that break and there's going to be some pain before things start to get better again.
B
Yeah, I mean, look, we were in probably the calm before the storm. Sellers are not yet distressed based on when they either purchased their properties or last refinanced. Buyers are not willing to spend the same amounts for real estate that they bought in 2021 or early 2022. Sellers aren't going to come down on the purchase prices. So we're in this, we're in this stalemate period and usually the fourth quarter is the busiest quarter in the real estate market for transactions. I think it's going to be the slowest quarter for this year, which is an anomaly and we'll see what 2023 brings. It's going to take some time for this to cycle through the system. But what's amazing to me, and I guess we'll finish on this point, is that this roller coaster that we've been riding on from, you know, 2019 things, you know, great, very bullish market to Covid in 2020-2021 back up again. One of the most robust cycles we had seen yet that was short lived. And now we're in a credit crunch with interest, high interest rate or higher interest rate environment. So in 2023, it could be completely different of what we're experiencing here in the third and fourth quarters of 2022.
C
I 100% agree. And that's real estate.
B
That's what makes it exciting.
C
Yeah, I mean, in some ways I think, you know, my closing note is that I greatly benefited from basically having the world fall apart so early in my career because I think it's important to know that the good times don't last forever. And if you always kind of have that. That view, then hopefully you can be smarter to take advantage of whenever those cycles turn.
B
That's great. Well, Vomsy, next time I'm in Chicago, we definitely have to get together in person this time. Get a steak at Gibson's or have a drink somewhere. And when you're, you know, freezing your butt off and you need to come out to LA to. To warm out, then. Then we'll get together.
C
Well, I was gonna say winter's coming, so it's more likely I'll meet you in LA than 85 Chicago.
B
It's 85 degrees right now. I left 35 degrees yesterday where you are to. To be at 85 degrees in LA. So come on out.
C
So. So I think you are the smart one here.
B
All right, Vomsy, I can't thank you enough. I really appreciate your time and good luck as things progress.
C
Thanks. Great catching up.
A
You've been listening to Real Talk, Real Estate discussions with Andrew Kirsch. You can catch prior episodes at www.sklawkirch and on YouTube, LinkedIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and more. Thank you for your positive reviews, comments and sharing this show with others.
Podcast: Real Talk: Real Estate Discussions with Andrew Kirsh
Episode: Insights into Select-Service Hotels with Vamsi Bonthala, CEO at Arbor Lodging Partners
Date: November 30, 2022
Host: Andrew Kirsh
Guest: Vamsi Bonthala
This episode delves into the journey of Vamsi Bonthala, who left a secure legal career to co-found Arbor Lodging Partners, a Chicago-based select-service hotel operator. The discussion tracks Arbor’s origins, navigating the Great Financial Crisis, its growth into a vertically integrated operation, and perspectives on the current and future landscape of hotel real estate, particularly amid unpredictable market cycles.
[01:28 – 07:20]
"Frankly, a lot of it was just fun and pie in the sky. And I think you just started to get some momentum and kind of two things came together." — Vamsi Bonthala [02:38]
"As my wife often jokes, she goes, I got engaged to a big law attorney and I married a 'quote-unquote entrepreneur,' which meant that I had no money." — Vamsi Bonthala [05:20]
[07:57 – 10:23]
"We absolutely benefit from being under one roof and working. The entire team works together." — Vamsi Bonthala [08:49]
[10:23 – 16:16]
"I know nothing about hotels, and I don't think Bumpsy knows anything about hotels, but he's a good dude, and we...should back him." — Vamsi Bonthala recounts investor's comment [11:22]
"They knew it was an incredibly stressful time to be a hotel owner and operator... Some of the first calls were like, how are you doing?" — Vamsi Bonthala on investor reactions during COVID [16:25]
[16:25 – 22:20]
"The demand came back so fast so strongly. I felt like we spent a lot of the year trying to hire people and...always playing from behind." — Vamsi Bonthala [22:23]
[22:20 – 30:24]
"We're clearly in the middle of a larger scale asset repricing...It is really uncomfortable to not make the bid when you know you have the ability to execute." — Vamsi Bonthala [24:48]
[26:54 – 32:09]
"I greatly benefited from basically having the world fall apart so early in my career, because I think it's important to know that the good times don't last forever." — Vamsi Bonthala [31:54]
On founding Arbor Lodging:
"Sometimes I wonder if I chose correctly when...everything is coming down on me. But...it's been a lot of fun." — Vamsi Bonthala [01:58]
On career risk:
"I basically worked two jobs for over a year until I felt like, okay, we might know what we're doing here…at least it’s not jumping into nothing and just figuring it out." — Vamsi Bonthala [06:12]
On partnerships in crisis:
"When things get bad, when there’s another COVID, who do I want to be a partner with? …That’s the type of guy we want to be in business with." — Vamsi Bonthala [14:25]
On the hotel recovery:
"This is a good problem to have. We just remember a year ago how bad things were." — Vamsi Bonthala [22:38]
On market cycles:
"We’re in this stalemate period...Usually, the fourth quarter is the busiest for transactions. I think it’s going to be the slowest." — Andrew Kirsh [30:24]
On lasting lessons:
"If you always kind of have that view [that cycles turn], then hopefully you can be smarter to take advantage of whenever those cycles turn." — Vamsi Bonthala [32:00]
Throughout the episode, the tone is candid, reflective, and occasionally humorous, with both Andrew and Vamsi leveraging their legal backgrounds to dissect risk, trust, and the importance of relationships in real estate investing. Vamsi’s insights blend humility over his learning curve with hard-won confidence in navigating hotel market cycles.
Vamsi Bonthala’s journey illustrates the rewards and challenges of entrepreneurial risk, the value of integrity and transparency with investors, and the flexibility needed to survive—and thrive—through economic cycles. The episode offers an insider’s look at hotel investing during turbulent times, with lessons applicable across real estate asset classes.