Building a Lifestyle Hotel Brand in Costa Rica | Bill Graf E52

We’ve all dreamt of quitting our bland corporate jobs to buy a hotel in Costa Rica… well, today’s guest did that.

After leaving a private equity career in San Francisco, Bill Graf traded suits for surf towns and founded Onda, a hospitality brand in Costa Rica that blends the style of a boutique hotel with the social energy of a hostel.

You’ll learn:

• How to uncover hidden opportunities in small hotels that big players ignore
• What U.S. investors should know about buying real estate in Costa Rica
• His unique strategy for keeping his properties full year-round

This episode is a blueprint for spotting opportunities where others see risk… and will certainly have you daydreaming by the end of it!

Follow along with The Hotel Investor Playbook to discover how to invest in hospitality assets the right way.

About Bill

William “Bill” Graf is the founder and CEO of ONDA, a hospitality collective in Costa Rica that blends boutique hotel comforts with the social energy of a hostel. A former investment banker and private equity professional, Bill left Wall Street in 2016 to travel the world, visiting over 50 countries and experiencing firsthand the challenges of inconsistent accommodations. Inspired to create a better model, he launched ONDA to deliver reliable, community-driven stays in lifestyle destinations where major hotel brands won’t go. Today, Bill is building ONDA into a global hospitality brand focused on culture, connection, and transformational guest experiences.

Connect with Bill

Website: www.stayonda.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/williamgraf

Instagram: @billygoat_graf and  @findyouronda

Connect with Michael on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Email Us at info@hotelinvestorplaybook.com

Visit the Hotel Investor Playbook Instagram

Invest with Malama Capital

Submit a deal

Transcript

Michael Russell 0:03

Welcome to the Hotel Investor Playbook, your guide to building wealth and freedom through boutique hotel ownership, hosted by Mike and Nate.

Nathan St Cyr 0:12

Get in the game.

Michael Russell 0:20

Welcome to the Hotel Investor Playbook. We're Mike and Nate, founders of Malama Capital, and your hosts. On this podcast, we talk story about everything you need to know to make money investing in hotels and in hospitality assets. On today's episode, we have Bill Graf. Bill went from working on Wall Street to building Onda in Costa Rica, which is a hospitality brand that blends the style and comfort of a boutique hotel, but with the social energy of a hostel. So that's right in line with what we do. We are pumped to hear Bill's story, and we're going to get into how he traded suits and spreadsheets for surf towns and built a pretty unique hospitality business down there in Latin America. So, Bill, thanks for joining us and welcome to the show.

Bill Graf 1:04

Thanks for having me. Yeah, Bill. Pumped. Let's go.

Michael Russell 1:08

So why don't we start right now? First of all, where are you located?

Bill Graf 1:12

Right now, I am in Panama.

Michael Russell 1:14

Okay, great. And so you're living the dream in Latin America, but your roots are in Wall Street. And so I have this disconnect between like those two completely separate paths. And I need you to help me understand how you got from point A to point B. So why don't you walk us through the journey from leaving the private equity equity world to traveling the world and then eventually founding Onda? And ultimately, I want to know what problem in hospitality did you feel compelled to solve?

Bill Graf 1:43

All right. What problem did I feel compelled to solve? I'm going to file that one away. We'll come back to it. So yeah, how did I end up trading a career in finance for beach life in Latin America? So originally I'm from Madison, Wisconsin, studied finance and real estate at the University of Wisconsin, right out of school, joined a middle market investment bank called Harris Williams and Company. And I was in their restaurant retail group, which means that I advised on the sale of a lot of large restaurant franchisors and franchisees, think 100 plus unit Wendy's franchisees, for example. Did that for two years and then jumped to a private equity fund out in San Francisco. But between those two jobs, I always wanted to go to Southeast Asia. I had seen a video or something of the Full Moon party in Copenyang in Thailand, and I really, really, really wanted to go. And so I had two weeks off and I essentially flew from my going away party at the bank to Tokyo, to Bangkok, and started, I think I checked into like the park high at Tokyo. And then I stayed at the Labua Bank. I go stay in all these five-star hotels. And one of my music festival buddies, Hippie Buddies, suggested, hey, you know, you you're sort of a hippie at heart. You should really get off the beaten path and stop going to these five-star hotels and try a hostel. And I'd never really done the hostel thing before. And so on his advice, I got to this little island in the Gulf of Thailand called Ko Tao. I checked into a hostel called Spicy Tao, which I don't think exists anymore. I think it was like five bucks a night. It was a hammock kind of on the side of a hill. There was like not running water, you know, a shower was with a bucket. And I had the best weave of my whole life. It was absolutely amazing. And it felt like summer camp or something. And there's all these people from all over the world. And I was talking to these people from New Zealand and Australia and Europe and asked them, you know, so how long are you here for, thinking that my two-week trip was like the longest vacation that anybody had ever had? And they all started talking, like, oh, I'm on a gap year. And I was just like, what the hell is a gap year? Nobody, nobody told Midwestern Bill that you could just not do anything for a year and travel around in the butt-of-the-backpack. I was like, wow, that sounds amazing. And so my two weeks were up, packed my backpack up, flew to San Francisco and went to work for the private equity fund. And I had it filed it away in the back of my head that I wanted to do a gap year, right? And I had kind of decided that I needed to do it before I turned 30, if I still wanted that like crunchy backpacker hostile experience. And so had worked at the PE fund for three years, sat down with my boss, and just said, Hey, you know, can I get a sabbatical? And they were trying to get me to sign on and go on a partner track and step up in terms of my level of commitment to the firm. And I was just like, I'm happy to do it, but I have to do this. I've seen, I've seen this light experience, and I've I've got to do it for myself. And they ran it at the flag bowl and he came back and he said, No, this is finance. We don't do sabbaticals. I'm super sorry. We can't give heat one. And so I just said, All right, I quit. And he laughed and you know, he gave me a high five and said, Give me a call and you get back. And I never called him back. And so I left that job and I started in Europe and then went to Southeast Asia on motorbike and solo motorbike through Vietnam for like five or six weeks and what was gonna be three months turned into six months, turned into nine months, essentially all over the world, uh staying in all sorts of accommodations, but but found myself bouncing back and forth between hostels when I wanted social and hotels when I wanted to be comfortable, right? And and I had I was in my late 20s, I think it was 28 or 29. I had kind of aged out of like the party hostile, backpacker hostel thing that caters to 18 to 24 year olds on a modest budget. I just kept thinking to myself, why is there not a place for people like me? And at the time, people like me was a pretty small bucket of ex-finance bros backpacking through Southeast Asia, but it's something that got pushed into the mainstream, I think, when COVID happened, the rise of digital nomadism and and geographic flexibility and work. But that really planted the seed for me uh into what ultimately grew into Honda, the company that I founded a few years later.

Nathan St Cyr 5:28

Okay, we're gonna dig into this, but I gotta I gotta rewind. Okay. Dude, I just I think that so many people have that moment where you know, where they're working or what their opportunity is, is of an incredible opportunity. And when they hit the resistance of, yeah, no, we don't, we don't, we're not gonna support that. The mindset that you had to just be like, no, this is what I'm doing, that level of conviction, you got to walk us through because I think that this is pivotal in a lot of people's lives and a lot of people that are looking at investing in real estate and in hospitality to make that step, to own that conviction. I want to understand your mindset. What what gave you the belief that that was the right move for you?

Bill Graf 6:20

Oof. And that's a good one. I think I was lucky enough to achieve professionally what I thought I wanted to achieve at a very young age. I always growing up, I wanted to be the business person, flying first class and riding in a black car and all these things that I got when I was like 22. When you get there and you're flying first class on American Airlines from like Miami to Philly, and you're like, oh, this isn't actually that great. Or you're in an Uber black car and you're like, this isn't that great. And I kind of had this epiphany, right? I was like 25, I was sitting there, I was looking around at the trajectory that I was on. And I sort of saw that the path that my life would take if I stayed there, and I sort of said, you know what? I kind of got what I came here for in terms of those experiences and and and those professional achievements. And I just had this feeling that if I didn't do this, it'd be one of those things that I'm an old man sitting somewhere 80, going, man, I really wish I would have done. And just having that nagging regret of I didn't do something that I wanted to do. And I, you know, in the back of my mind, I was like, you can always go back to finance. There's somebody that'll take me back, whether it's a bank or a PE fund or a hedge fund or whatever. There's a certain window in life and you can take leaps like the leap that I took. And if you don't take it at that point in time, that door, that window could close. It's not to say that a different one won't open in the future, but yeah, I do to this sort of a an hour or never. And so I took the leap and I don't regret it.

Nathan St Cyr 7:40

Yeah, I think that this is so critical to understand. Number one, it sounds like that fear of regret was really a motivating factor. Like, okay, well, if I don't do this, then what? And that's a really important question to ask. But then at the same time, well, what's the worst thing that can happen? Correct. I I end up that was my call. I end up back where where where I am right now. And yeah, I think that that's really sound. I think that's really sound advice for when when people hit that that really pivotal moment.

Michael Russell 8:13

Yeah. I want to hone in on what you have been describing. You know, your background is not hospitality at this point. I mean, sure, yeah, working on Wall Street and Finance and then having some experience with franchise companies, but you're cruising around, you're enjoying this glorious lifestyle, you're you're taking this gap year. But how did you come to the conclusion that you wanted to go from enjoying staying in hospitality locations to running them?

Bill Graf 8:37

Well, I mean, I think we'd be kidding if we didn't say that that's not a thought that everybody's had after a few too many beers sitting around a campfire somewhere, right? At a really cool hostel, really cool hotel. You go, man, like how cool it'll be to have my own place like this. And I had my fair share of those thoughts when I was traveling, but but I actually didn't take the leap into doing this professionally until years later. I traveled around, I got in the I did go back and got another corporate job. I did it for about 18 months. I hated it. I got let go. I got a severance. So then I just traveled again for like six or nine months in Central South America. And then COVID happened, right? And so COVID was really, really the genesis of me sitting in a condo in Madison, Wisconsin in April of 2020, too cheap to pay for YouTube TV. So I was watching Bloomberg streaming on my Chromecast. And I just remember every morning I woke up, they're like, oh, we're never getting on an airplane, we're never getting on a. I mean, it was all doom and glue. And I was like, travel is one of my favorite things in the world. Like a world where we don't get to go do those things again is not necessarily a world that I want to live in. And one part that we skipped over was the private IP fund that I worked for, I would describe as a highly contrarian font. When everybody's running one way, they like to run the other way. They're also a what I would call a deep value fund. We never got to do the fun, sexy deals trading at high multiples. We were always looking for diamonds in the rough, these hairy, funky deals that for whatever reason nobody else wanted to do, but that if you did and you did right, there's sort of an asymmetry in the risk reward. And so I'm sitting there going, okay, everybody's every day I turn the TDL, people are running out of hospitality, right? You're watching the stock tickers for the cruise lines and the airlines and all the hotel companies, and they're just tanking. And that for me was sort of ironically the genesis where I'm going, okay, this is it. If I'm gonna dive headfirst into this, rather than do it when times are good, do it when times are tough. Because that's probably when there's the most opportunity. And so had that crazy idea in my condo in Madison, Wisconsin, started putting some feelers out and recognized that I don't know. I've never run a hotel, I've never run a bar. You know, I was a teenager, I worked at a Target stop stocking shelves, but I, you know, I don't know the first thing about running a hospitality business. And so one of the first things I did was uh effectively identify my operating partner, a guy who's now our COO. He's Dutch, he's been in hospitality his whole life, and I called him up and I said, Hey, I've got this crazy idea. I'm gonna go down to uh Central America broadly. I'm gonna find a hotel, but if I find him, will you get on a plane and come over and help me run? Because I don't know how to run. And so that was really the genesis for what ultimately blossomed into Honda. Sounds familiar.

Michael Russell 11:09

Yeah, I think we can we can relate to the term hairy, funky deal, like contrarian. That definitely fits the formula that we followed so far. And to a degree, there's a lot of upside in it, but it also can be very challenging. And so I want to dig even dig into some of those challenges. But before we get down that route, like I need to know a little bit more about well, what is OwnDot? What is it that that you're providing? Is it is it a boutique hotel? Is it a hostel? Who is your guest avatar?

Bill Graf 11:38

So I'm gonna take a step back because actually, for the first three-ish years that we were building this company, I think I talked about it wrong. I talked about our go-to-market rather than what we're building. What we're actually building is a franchise system for small hotels and lifestyle destinations. Looking back at my experience at the bank, in the United States, we're bombarded with brands and franchises for, you know, fast food, retail, restaurants, the whole thing. What I realized when I was traveling in these exotic places like I don't know, Hannockville, Cambodia, or Kotau, Thailand, there were no brands at the end of these long dirt roads. Right. And so that's the opportunity that we're trying to take advantage of is can we build out a process and a system and a platform that allows you to profitably manage, call it sub-100 key, sub-80-key hotels in some of the world's most interesting places. And so that's really the core of what we're building. And then our first go-to-market is the brand Onda, which is an experiential travel brand targeted at people in kind of their 20s, 30s, and 40s. As you said at the beginning, it's the soul of the hostel combined with the infrastructure amenities and creature comforts of like a three-star hotel. And that's what we launched with because that's where we saw the most opportunity. But what we're excited to do going forward is take our platform, and there's nothing stopping us from deciding, hey, you know, maybe this one particular property would be better for a brand for families or for couples or for something higher end or uh surf camps. You could pick all sorts of different go-to-markets. And our plan, just like all the major hotel brands, is eventually to have more than one flag, right? So that when we identify a property, somebody brings us a property, we can kind of figure out what bucket it fits into. But underlying that is that platform of processes and systems that allows us to profitably manage these small hotels that the big brands will never touch.

Michael Russell 13:28

Yep.

unknown 13:29

All right.

Michael Russell 13:30

So let's kind of connect the dots a little bit here. So you've got this experience in systems processes with the franchise model. Then you go and you have this amazing experience where you go, hey, I want end of the dirt road type of experience. I don't want your cookie cutter hotel experience. I want something that you phrased as more of a lifestyle hotel or experiential lodging. And so you go down to Costa Rica. And what was it about Costa Rica that made you say, okay, this is the spot. Why Costa Rica?

Bill Graf 14:00

Yeah, I mean, it was it's a it was a super practical choice. We knew that we wanted to cater to essentially Americans and Canadians. And so we said we want to be in the same time zones as the continental US. We don't want to be more than a four or five hour flight away. And we need somewhere where we feel comfortable owning the real estate. We knew, just like any hospitality brand, you start by owning the dirt. You start by owning the building. You can't jump straight to frame checks. And so our target countries were called Mexico down to Colombia, give or take, that fit those parameters. And ultimately went with Costa Rica just because it's from a from a jurisdictional standpoint, from a stability standpoint, if I have to own real estate somewhere in Central America, Costa Rica is where I want to own it. It's not cheap, it's highly bureaucratic. There's a there's a million things about Costa Rica that make it challenging. But at the end of the day, it's a country that abolished their military in 1948. They reinvested all their money into healthcare and public education. They have not been subject to a coup, like essentially almost every single one of the neighboring countries has been. We can conduct business in the US dollar. There's two international airports, each serving, I think, 18 plus U.S. cities. So just tons and tons and tons of volume, easy to get to, comfortable, and just has a great reputation as a destination for sort of adventure travelers and folks seeking out those types of lifestyle destinations, right? I mean, we look at the map of Costa Rica and I think there's easily 10 pins that we could put on that map.

Michael Russell 15:25

Yeah. I was really excited to dive into this because we get asked all the time, like, hey, do you have an interest in opening a hostel in Mexico? Or how about Costa Rica? Or at least just for a variety of other foreign countries? And we've always just explained, you know, that's that's not where our focus is right now. I think you're actually the first person, Bill, that that we've had on our show that is that purchasing real estate in a foreign country. So I really want to dive into the nuts and bolts of owning property in a foreign country. Can you walk us through like what is the process? I mean, is it just like buying in the US or are there big differences that investors should know about?

Bill Graf 16:00

So it's different country by country. And I've sort of skipped over that. That's one of the reasons I think we ruled up Mexico was in Mexico and did you need like a local partner to own real estate? Costa Rica was chosen because foreigners have the same property rights as Costa Rican citizens. I would say, you know, and I'm most equipped to speak to Costa Rica. So don't take what it what I'm saying is necessarily applicable to any foreign country or even any Central American country. In general, if you find a good attorney, and if folks are interested, I'm happy to make recommendations or introductions. You're good. They'll walk you through the process. I would say be careful about brokers in Costa Rica specifically. There, there's no accreditation to become a real estate agent or a broker. So anybody can purport to be a broker, and they some of them are very good, some of them are not very good. Um But in general, yeah, you you go down, you you find a piece of property that you want to buy, you engage a law firm, they have to spin up a local entity. You typically don't title things in your own names. You need to spin up in our case, uh, it's an SRL society, it's essentially an LLC. It translates to the same thing as LLC. You spin up that LLC, it gets a bank account, the LLC buys the property. In Costa Rica, most land in the interior of the country is titled. You do need to be careful around the coasts. There's a fringe of 200 meters from every single coastline. Where you do not own it fee simple. You have it on a concession from the government who jumps in and regulates what you can do there. But then, yeah, you you buy it and you hold it in the company and you pay property tax. And I mean, it's all relatively straightforward. And again, one of the reasons we chose Costa Rica is that there's a robust network of service providers like accountants and lawyers who will help you through the process. Some of the biggest differences that you do need to be careful of is, you know, unlike an LLC, there is no pass-through entity in most of these countries. So like each of these entities is a tax-paying entity itself or like a corporation in the United States. So to the extent that it's profitable, it will pay taxes in whatever country you're operating in, in our case in Costa Rica. However, those taxes do tend to be dollar for dollar deductible from any US tax liability a US owner would have. And so rather than doing a deep dive on the nuance of taxes that'll bore you guys, I would just flag that as if you're going to buy property in a foreign country, make sure you've got a good tax advisor in the United States who understands how to take advantage of, again, those are not deductions. Those are those are those are tax credits for taxes paid in a poor jurisdiction.

Michael Russell 18:28

Yeah. Okay, I want to circle back to the title piece because this is my biggest fear. This is what keeps me up at night. I think about, and this is a total hypothetical scenario. It's this recurring dream. It's like, okay, I own this awesome piece of property in Costa Rica. Woo-hoo, I'm having a blast, living the dream. And then one day some folks come in and say, you know what? This is actually my relative's land. You bought this land illegally and we're taking it back. And I'm 2,500 miles away, going, I'm sorry, what's happening? And it's a foreign language, it's a completely different culture, different country. And through some bureaucratic process, they say, sorry, yeah, actually they do have a stake in this property. And the title that you thought you had for inclair is actually, yeah, it's not. And so this could occur even in the US. This is a challenge, even in the US, but it's even more enhanced when I think about Costa Rica to be specific. And so I'm wondering, like, okay, can you provide some insight on that? Is that fear warranted? Or is it title insurance just like just as effective as in the US? And it is what it is.

Bill Graf 19:32

It is a warranted fear that you can mitigate. If you go in and you don't use a lawyer and you come in and somebody just says buy this piece of land, and they you you you wire them cash and they hand you a piece of paper, absolutely something like the the horror story that you described could happen. And again, without boring people, somebody, if you want to look into it, right in most of the countries in Latin America, I can't remember. There's there's two different types of law in the world. It's common law and civil law. I believe we follow common law in the United States, which is derived from English law. Whereas most of the former Spanish colonies are civil law, they tend to be way more bureaucratic, which can be a pain in the ass when you're trying to sign documents and things like that. But what it means is that they all have national registries. Titles for everything, vehicles, property, whatever, is in a database with the government, right? And so if you engage with a competent attorney, that will be one of that's probably the first thing they do in due diligence when you go to buy a property is pull the title history from the government, right? And you get it certified and stamped from the federal government. And that before you buy it, you would know if there were any outstanding claims on that title or disputes on that title. And so when you buy it, the deal is only technically done when your new title has been inscribed in the national registry. And then most law firms, as part of their sort of annual compliance package, monitor it. And to the extent that somebody does try to challenge it or change it or do anything like that, you get an alert. And so, short answer to your question, it's something you need to be aware of and cognizant of, but you can mitigate it. Whether or not title insurance explicitly exists, I'm not sure. We we've never been advised to take out a policy. But yeah, again, all roads point back to get a good lawyer.

Michael Russell 21:13

Yeah. So I went on your website and I immediately had an emotional reaction because it's killer, and you paint the picture. There's so there's a there's a lady, she's driving a bike or motorcycle or something, and she's cruising around, everyone's so happy and everyone's surfing, and there's that what's that term in Costa Rica that's like the pura vida. Pura vida. They're living the pura vida life, having a blast. Okay. So for obvious reasons, there are advantages in terms of lifestyle. You've already discussed some of those, what chose you, what why you were drawn to that lifestyle. But this show is first and foremost, it's about investing in hospitality assets. And so what I want to know is from an investor's perspective, what are the upsides of investing in Latin America, for example? What are the real advantages from a profit potential that you saw over investing in a lifestyle resort, let's say domestically?

Bill Graf 22:10

Yeah, very big picture. I think there's arbitrage opportunities. You need to be careful, you need to do your diligence, you need to be discerning, you should jump at the first deal that you see. But these are markets that are significantly less sophisticated and less transparent than the markets in the United States and Western Europe. And that's actually to be played to your advantage. For example, there's no MLS in these places. You can't really get comps, which can work against you or can work for you. In general, our big hypothesis, right? If you look at the a version of my highest level version of my pitch tick, the thesis is that there's this long tail. So something like 90% of hotels in the world are under 100 keys. Most hotels in Costa Rica are are under 100 keys. It's mom and pop hotels all over the country. There's great infrastructure, but it's undermanaged. And so there's an opportunity, if you can come in and you can strike the right deal, that you could buy a piece of property and not improve performance by 20 to 30%, right? True, which I think would be a home run for a deal in the United States. I think we like 5x'd the total revenue from our first hotel relative to the previous operator, right? And so if you can go in and you can structure a deal where you're buying on either replacement value or below replacement value, or convincing the seller to sell to you on the basis of a cap rate applied to their NOI, and you can 5x revenue, triple profitability, you can get to outcomes that you're probably not going to be able to get to in a real estate deal in the United States just because those markets are so much more robust. They're more transparent, there's more buyers, there's more sellers, there's more data. The level of sophistication is just that much higher. And so if you're willing to roll up your sleeves and take the risk, I think you can generate outsized risk-adjusted returns by doing deals in these geographies.

Nathan St Cyr 23:59

Hey guys, if you're excited about investing in hospitality, but still have a few question marks in your mind, you're not alone. Maybe you understand the potential, but you're not quite ready to take down your own deal quite yet. Early in our journey, both Mike and I invested passively alongside seasoned operators and gave us the behind-the-scenes view and showed us a playbook while our money worked for us. That's what we offer our capital partners: a chance to be a part of real deals, see how they come together, and start building the confidence to do in yourself without carrying all the risk on your first go. If you'd like to know what that might look like for you, just click on the link in the show notes. Now let's get back to it. When I hear that, one of my first things that I go to, and look, I when you say that, I go, yeah, but. And usually when I hear yeah, but it's because there's a limiting belief behind that, yeah, but so I just want to I want to admit that as I as I ask this question. One of the things that we look at when we look at, okay, we believe that we can increase revenue, profitability. And then when we go to, but ultimately there's going to be, there needs to be an exit for our investors in some capacity. And usually that exit is the sale of the asset. And so when I think about you going in and tripling profitability, I go, okay, on the flip side of that though, do you really, are you really going to realize that true value like you would in a in a US property? Who ends up being that buyer that's going to go in and pay that new adjusted exit price?

Bill Graf 25:43

So that's a fantastic question. And candidly, we have not exited a piece of our property yet. So I want to point that out before we go into my answer. But I will say this everybody wants to own a beach hotel in Latin America. The number of people that we see coming to Costa Rica, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, I'll lump them in. My dad's a dentist. I love them, but it's doctors and dentists and lawyers who have this dream. Everybody wants to own one. They want to brag about because they're friends of the country club. They don't understand how much work is involved. And so when we model out our exits, I think one of one of our the most realistic opportunities that we professionalize these things and we turn around and say, look, here it is. Here's a turnkey hotel. We've done all the heavy lifting, we've done all the hard work. We're happy to either continue operating it under a master lease or an HMA. And then you've got your own hotel. You can do whatever you want with it, but you don't have to worry about any of this stuff. We've de-risked it significantly. And so for the smaller hotels, that probably applies to kind of 20 to 30 key hotels, hotels with a price called between probably three and five million dollars, or target any high net worth, maybe ultra high net worth individuals. Once you get above that, there are regional private equity funds. So for example, we actually just signed a master lease today on a 60-key property in Central America. I can't quite say where, but it's it's owned by a regional private equity fund that has three or four properties like this in the country where we are. And so there is an appetite. But again, yeah, it's not quite as developed as the United States. And so I do think that's a legitimate risk. And it's one that I hope to have mitigated in the next 12 to 18 months as we look to exit our first property. So I could come back and say, hey, yeah, we were able to do it, and here's how we did it. But sitting here today, no, I don't have a track record of having actually done that.

Nathan St Cyr 27:25

Yeah, I appreciate that transparency.

Michael Russell 27:28

All right. Well, what I know about Latin America is the biggest example of someone operating in this space, because basically what you're doing is look, I hope you don't take offense to this, but it's a postel, right? It's a postel. Very much so, yes. It is a glamorous hostel. And look, we operate with the same mindset. Like we went and built something that was really cool. It wasn't just to the standards of like the cheapest thing possible that a backpacker could afford. We said, look, we're gonna go build it to our standards because we want to be proud of what we're offering. And much to the degree that you're talking about the trophy asset, the doctors, the lawyers, the dentists, what have you. It feels good to own something that's cool. And so the last big company that we witnessed operating in Central America was Selena. And I believe, I don't know this for certain. Maybe you can help attest to this. But their model was not to own the real estate. It was just to lease it and operate it. It was a cash flow play. It wasn't an equity play. It wasn't like in the future they were going to build up this big portfolio and exit by some huge sell. They were just gonna manage properties and generate cash flow. But that failed. They went out of business, they went bankrupt. And so I need some help understanding okay, there's a lot of growth opportunity to scale franchise, but you're talking about one point, I believe your first property is Playa Grande and you own that, right? Correct. But you just communicated now that your second property is a lease.

Bill Graf 28:57

Which funnily enough, it is a former Selena property that I'm sitting in.

Michael Russell 29:01

Okay. Wonderful. So even better. So walk us through this model then. Is this really uh an operations thing where you're just gonna cash flow from these bad boys?

Bill Graf 29:11

Yeah, I mean, with regard to our strategy, we have an opco propco structure, right? We see opportunities on both sides. And so we're we're more opportunistic on the real estate side. It's a it's a higher bar because it's more capital intensive. But at heart, I am a real estate guy. I studied real estate in in college. I like real estate. Most of my personal money's tied up in real estate, in our real estate. It's just a much higher bar for those deals. And so the reason we have the opco going is because we think there's a completely separate opportunity there to either lease or manage under an HMA or potentially a franchise agreement, hotels that for whatever reason we wouldn't want to own or don't have the capacity to own. I don't know.

Michael Russell 29:49

So can I interrupt one second? Yeah, I just because I'm not as smart as you, Bill, and I got to know what is an you said an HMA?

Bill Graf 29:55

So an HMA, right? So if we think about a hotel, the simplest structure is where you own it, you operate it, right? That's like every mom and pop hotel is just one company that owns and operates. Um, the next one up the level of complexity would be somebody owns a hotel and you just lease it. So, for example, the hotel that I'm sitting in right now, we pay fixed monthly rent, right? And the landlord doesn't really care how our revenue is or how our reviews are or what grand we put in. You know, he just gets to collect his free his fixed monthly rent every single month. The next step up, like the sophistication curve, would be a hotel management agreement. And this is what you typically see for Hilton's and Hyatt's and Marriott's and things like that in the United States. It's a combination of a hotel management agreement and a franchise agreement, where the building owner hires a company to come in and run the hotel for them. And so under an HMA, typically the manager just gets a percentage of revenue and profitability. You can structure it a bunch of different ways, but that the manager's not actually taking any profitability risk. They are just managing an asset on behalf of the owner. And then all the way up, right, where you're seeing more and more of the legacy hospitality companies move is the franchise model, where they don't own the building. It's not their employees in the building, they're not managing it. They're literally just licensing their brand and their website and their loyalty program to the building owner, who then hands those brand standards to that management company and says, hey, you need to go run Hilton's brand standards. And by the way, if you fail to meet them, Hilton's gonna rip their name off the build. And in in that franchise model, it's it's great. I mean, if you look, I think Marriott has actually higher margins than Microsoft does. Like their margin on their franchise revenue is like 68% or something like that. It's absolutely wild if you can pull that off. And so I'm not sitting here actually advocating for one of these models or the other, right? There's a thousand ways to skin a cat, and you need to make sure that you're deploying the correct structure for whatever deal that it is that you're working on. One of the reasons, for example, that we're leasing this property here, and that Selena leased a lot of the properties, is that the HMA structure is just not understood for properties of this size in these geographies. Most of the time, your counterparties are not super sophisticated folks. It's it's older folks whose families have owned these hotels for generations and generations, and they kind of don't want to have to care what your PL looks like. They just want you to sign a very simple contract that says every month on the fifth of the month, I get paid $20,000 and you're going to maintain the property. And if we like each other at the end of five years, we get to renew or something like that.

Nathan St Cyr 32:23

Okay, but but what we haven't addressed in this is where Mike's original question was is okay, Selena failed. Why? And what what is the difference? What how do you differentiate from that? So what did they what was their structure versus what is Selena?

Bill Graf 32:38

Selena failed not strictly because of their structure, although structure play department. Selena failed because, like we work, they were a realistic company masquerading as a tech company. And they raised a bunch of venture capital on realistic terms or sorry, on venture capital terms with venture capital growth expectations, and they couldn't meet them. And they never actually figured out how to operate profitably. And so I've got a sort of a love hate with Selena. I mentioned I was traveling, I don't know, 10 years ago, bouncing back and forth between hostels to be social and hotels to be comfortable. And I do remember my very first Selena was in Antigua, Guatemala. And I checked in, I was like, holy shit, like this is it. This is the place. Uh this company's got it figured out. And it definitely stuck with me. And it was definitely in the back of my mind when we launched Koondas is are we always going to be thought of as a Selena competitor? Since then, I think I've stayed in 20 plus Selenas. And what I saw happen is the quality of existing locations declined. And then the quality of the new locations that they opened declined because their focus was never on operations. Their focus was never on profitability. Their focus was actually never even on the guest experience. Their focus was on growth and growth alone. And that's ultimately what brought them down. If you go and look at their public filings, you'll see that at the end, it didn't matter how many new locations they opened because each marginal unit was unprofitable at the four-wall level, right? At the site level. So every time you open a new location, you're actually becoming less profitable. And that's ultimately what brought them down. If they had slowed down, figured out their unit economics, and ensured that every time they brought new properties on, they were profitable within 12 or 18 months, I think they'd still be around. Unfortunately, they were chasing vanity metrics and they chased growth at all costs. And that worked when there was sort of free, unlimited money in a zero interest rate environment. But in Q1 of 2023, when interest rates went up and the three money party stopped and the VC ran out, uh, they were burning a hundred-ish million dollars of cash a year and they couldn't figure out profitability before they ran out of cash. And that's what happened.

Michael Russell 34:39

Can we talk a little bit about funding for your projects here? Because I've heard you mention that you go and you'll make improvements, you'll find an opportunity where you can go and you can, like in your case, you 5x the the revenue. But in order to accomplish that, oftentimes it's more than just the staff and the personnel. You're making physical improvements, which takes cold, hard cash. So, how does lending work? So there's two sides I want to know about how do you fund this from a lending perspective? Is it possible to get bank loans? And then secondly, from an equity perspective, how have you positioned raising capital for these? Has it been a syndication or joint venture? Walk us through that.

Bill Graf 35:21

Okay. So let's start with our first property, right? It's a 20-key property. We ended up putting about $2 million into it all in. So $100,000 a key. We raised equity to do that deal. When I went and fundraised, it was mostly from friends and family and former colleagues, my extended personal network on an idea and my reputation back in 2020 or 2021. The intention was to do that property 100% with equity. And so that's what we did to begin with. Bank lending is substantially different here. It's substantially more limited. I'm not going to say it doesn't exist. It does exist, but it's very difficult in definitely in Costa Rica, most of the most of the Central American countries. So we did the first deal with equity. We were able to get a loan from one of our shareholders. We actually bought a second property off in the cloud forest of Monte Verde that we've owned for the last two and a half years. We've been operating it as is. It's a kind of a rustic pensium. And we've been going through the entitlement process and building out plants, completely redevelop that. And where we got is that once we get to three years of operating history, that's when the banks will talk to you. And so we were able to get a bank-provided mortgage in Costa Rica. I would like to continue expanding our bank banking relationships, but it's it's on a much slower time frame than you see in the United States. Just to give you guys sort of round numbers. I mean, we got, I think we got essentially 40% loan to cost, about an $800,000 loan on a $2 million property. And it's a it's a variable rate mortgage. I they use some Costa Rican index, I forget what it is, but the effective interest rate is about 10.75%. So significantly higher than you'd get in the United States. In general, capital formation is probably the single biggest challenge that my company faces, right? Which is one of the reasons why we're pursuing some of these lease deals. Again, this new deal that we just signed today, it's the 60-key hotel here. It's a lease with the option to purchase, right? And so our hope here is that we can run it for three years. Once we get that operating history, we go to a bank and maybe we can borrow enough to buy it. But if you're starting fresh, you need to come well capitalized. And I think, again, that sort of limits the pool of participants here. I think it's one of the reasons why you could get outsized returns because it just makes it that much more difficult to do business in these countries. You got to show up with cash at close.

unknown 37:49

Yeah.

Michael Russell 37:49

I mean, I'm just running the numbers real quick and I'm making some speculations here, but you know, I've looked at your website and I see these rooms for 13 bucks a night. Now, granted, those are dorm rooms, right? I don't know how many bodies you got in there, but I doubt there's a hundred. So some rough just benchmarks based on what I know about 20, a 20-unit property with a mix of privates and and dorms. I mean, you can't be doing more than seven to eight hundred thousand dollars in revenue, right?

Bill Graf 38:15

Doing about a million.

Michael Russell 38:17

Okay. Okay.

Bill Graf 38:18

So that's more than so we do, and it's funny, we we've struggled with this. What to call these things? I call it a hotel, but in actual, we actually do more than 50% of our revenue from non-hotel fans. 40% of our revenue is the hotel room, 60% is F and B and tours and activities and transportation, things like that. We almost landed on calling these things like social hubs or community hubs, because unlike a traditional, if you think about a resort, right? People say, Oh, how's your resort in Costa Rica? I'm like, I do not own a resort in Costa Rica. The JW Marriott's a resort, the Weston's a resort. It's behind 15 different gates, and you got to check in with security to get there. And they're really designed to isolate folks from the surrounding communities. But the people spending money at the Marriott are the registered Marriott hotel guests. Our properties are designed way differently. We're designed to be integrated into communities where we operate. Our doors are wide open. And so some of our best clients are people who aren't even hotel guests, right? That the digital nomads who live across the street, they have an Airbnb for six months, but they come over and eat like two meals a day on-prem. They use the coworking space, they have their friends and family stay at our hotel when they come to town to visit. And so we're able to drive outsized unit economics because of our diversified revenue streams and the fact that we don't rely exclusively on our in-house hotel guests to drive revenue.

Michael Russell 39:34

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, I I get it. So there's this disconnect because the Marriott is offering American prices for that experience in a Latin America country. And so there's a higher margin that they could possibly capitalize on. But if no families, no kids, your advertising, your avatar, from what I understand, are more of the what would you call it, remote worker. They're there for a longer vacation. So they're probably a little they're less inclined to spend as much because they're for a longer vacation. So if they're looking to spend less money, I'm going, all right. We had Bashar Wally on the podcast recently, and he was talking about go for the high margin opportunity. He gave this example like, would you rather serve McDonald's and sell a bunch of McDonald's burgers at a low margin or just go sell this deluxe burger and sell a fraction of them but make more money? You know, I don't know that relates exactly to hospitality, but the point is funny, and I know I know Washar.

Bill Graf 40:32

He's one of our advisors. Uh, and I disagree, I respectfully disagree with him there. I think one of the reasons that the hospitality, high end hospitality is very crowded. I think there are a lot of people chasing it very, very high margin. There's not people doing a high volume hospitality concept because it's really hard to do that well, right? When traditionally we think of hospitality as being very high touch, very people focused, that you want a higher staff to guest ratio, and that's how you drive those margins. We subscribe more to the, I'm not gonna say McDonald's philosophy, I'll use Chipotle or uh calls or uh five guys or something, you know, a bougie burger. But we pride ourselves on being an affordable price point. So that that that guy, you know, let's say it is a remote worker sitting with us for a month. Could he could he save a little bit of money by going down to the store and buying a beer? Sure, but like our beer's priced right at that sweet spot where we're betting on the fact that he's just too lazy to do it, right? And it it's a convenience play. We try to take friction out of consumption and have on-site programming to keep people there and keep people spending, right? When you you have a reservation with us, we keep everybody's credit card on file, and you can just run up as big of a tab as you want, you don't even think about it, and you get the tab PN, and it just doesn't seem that bad relative to the service and the value that you got. So, one of the other things I do think is worth mentioning though when we talk about unit economics and margin, because we we sort of have two modes in which we operate our business, right? And so what you're seeing on the website is our sort of day-to-day mode where we're selling dorm bets for 13 bucks, right? We sell for occupancy, we're trying to get as many bodies in the property as possible to drive experience, drive social interaction, so that when we do have that on-site programming, it's really fun. That's actually not where we make the most of our money. Where we make most of our money is B2B. And what we found is that there's this really interesting underserved niche in corporate offsites. We've leaned into doing corporate offsites for like uh companies that have raised venture capital with teams of between 20 and 50 people. And what we do is we just privatize the whole hotel. It's totally turnkey. We had an off-site client earlier this year, they paid us, what was it, $150,000 for four days. And they brought 50 people down. It was all inclusive food, all inclusive beverage. We took care of all the transportation, all the activities, chartered catamarans for them, brought in speakers. Now we've got our multifunctional debt with a projector where they can do presentations and stuff. And so for us, that's what a high margin client looks like. We're not trying to find high margin onesie twosie clients, we're trying to find high margin B2B clients. And then when we can't fill our timeline with those B2B clients, that's when we operate in the $13 a nightform mode.

Nathan St Cyr 43:02

Okay, so I won't I want to go strategic on this. So we've we we did attack a little bit, I wouldn't say full force, but we had this as a philosophy. So how do you run when do you open up reservations for somebody to book them? Like how do you keep how do you keep the ability to be able to book the entire thing? How far out does that happen before you start open opening up for just standardized reservations?

Bill Graf 43:27

We usually only open up, I think, like 90 days out for standard reservations. Most of our guests are not booking more than 90 days out. The vast majority of our bookings are within three to six weeks, I would say. And so, I mean, that's one of the things we we talked about the franchise system and all that stuff at the beginning. It was sort of intangible. One of the things that we've done is we build out a data warehouse, we use Tableau, which is the business intelligence tool. Any of these kind of questions we can answer very quickly and dig into it. And that was one of our learnings is that what we should try to do is the booking window for a corporate offsite is more the three to 12 months out. But then the booking window for our onesie choosy guests is sub-three months. And so they complement each other really well there. And so that's really our sales strategy is try to sell corporate offsite's weddings, bachelor parties, wellness retreats, all that stuff first. And then whatever doesn't sell in that mode gets released to onesie choosy bookings.

Michael Russell 44:21

I'm really excited about this, Billy. I mean, the for listeners can't see me, but I'm like standing up an extra inch because I'm like, oh, tell me more about this. Because I'm seeing this pattern over and over and over again. People on Palm Springs, people in Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia who have these killer little like lakefront spots, whatever, right? There's these, I want to call micro resorts, but there's this constant theme of saying, okay, we can create something really freaking cool. We buy something that is unreally realized in a sense. Like someone has some old decrepit cabins, it's in a great location, but it's uh kind of remote. And the seller's like, I don't know, it's been my family for 50 years. Oh yeah, I'll sell it super cheap. And someone goes in with a vision, they put in the cold plunge, the sauna, they have great little like common areas where people can interact. And this thing's all set up for bonding and for community. But if you look at it from the lens of, oh, it's just a really cool, like individual place to stay, well, it people don't always want to connect with strangers. They want to just go and have their little like experience, a little romantic getaway, whatever. But then how do you go when you fill like the the economy of scale of like being able to fill all the units where you got to make the block and then you got to advertise to those groups? And so I'm like, yes, I like this idea. And then I go, uh-oh, I don't know how to advertise to groups. How the heck do you get them? Like, how do I get these these groups to come and want to stay at my spot? Like, I don't know these corporate, I don't have like a relationship with these big tech companies. Like, do I just pick up the phone and call one of these tech companies and say, hey, you want to come stay at my cool little spot? Like it doesn't have to be in Costa Rica. I mean, I see these things everywhere throughout California and all these different states. How how do you get the people? How do you so how do you market to these groups?

Bill Graf 45:59

So that's the secret sauce, right? I mean, uh, and I can't claim that we perfected it, but I can tell you what we do. It's we don't market, we do sales. And so we start by running a screen. We know about our property, right? As we've talked about a few times, it's designed for folks kind of in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. This is not going to be a great venue for like the president's club salespeople coming down with their wives or their kids, and like people like my dad's age. And so we target venture capital-backed startups in US cities with direct flights to the Liberia Airport in Costa Rica, which is the closest airport to us. And then we use a tool called Crunch Base, and you can screen based on when did somebody raise a round, right? So that's the catalyst for us is what did they raise a venture capital round? Because guess what? If they just raised a $10 million round, they got $10 million in the bank and coming to spend, I don't know, $100,000, $150,000 with us to build team cohesion and ensure that they get from their seat to their series A or to series A to their series B. I'd like to think you can justify that as an investment. And so that's the cattle. So we start with this list of companies who's raised money. And then we use an AI tool called Clay. I think it's spelled C L A Y or Cake. Yeah, I and I don't use it personally. Our team uses it. We take that list of every quarter, I don't know how many companies raise Metro Cattle. Five or companies raise more than five million dollars or something in the United States. We feed it into clay and we say, okay, now I need you to go look on the LinkedIn profile for all of these companies and their and their C-suite people and see if they've ever posted about an off-site in the past. That that's like the that's like the icing on the cake is that the biggest predictor of who is going to pay for an off-site in the future is have you already done long? And then we reach out on LinkedIn, we reach out via email, we reach out via phone for high value leads. We actually have like little unda-branded coffee bags that we put a little postcard and we drop it into a USPS thing and we mail it to their headquarters with a like a hey, scan this QR code to watch a cool trailer video. We sort of throat everything at this smaller number of high-value clients. You know, we're not trying to cast a super wide net and see what we catch. We sort of like, we know who our ideal clients are. We we make a really concerted effort to go after them.

Michael Russell 48:13

Has it has it worked?

Bill Graf 48:16

It's worked enough. I think we've just scratched the surface. In my perfect world, we would be doing one of these events a month, right? I mean, you you were pretty close. You backed into our numbers. Yeah, I said we were doing about a million dollars of revenue at that hotel a year. We did $150,000 four days for that one client. If I can do just one of those a month, I can increase my revenue by 50%. I think those folks are out there. I think it's just a matter of getting in front of them and mostly convincing people for for us specifically to come to a foreign country. If you've got folks in your network who are working with hotels in the United States, the bar might be lower. And I think there's a really unique niche for these experiential properties that you were talking about, because we're sort of in this fun middle area where like smaller teams kind of go to an Airbnb, and that's very like a self-service, a DIY offsite. That might be good for like a very small team of like five to ten people. And then the huge teams are gonna have to go to these mega resorts where they're gonna get impersonal service, you're gonna be, you know, just a block of rooms somewhere in a 500-key resort. In the section in the middle, it's real fun because it's like here, take the whole property. You can do whatever you want with it. If you want a DJ, you want a movie night, whatever. If there's no other paying guests here, like go nuts. You guys can rip tequila shots by the pool and through, you know, start throwing people into the pool if you want.

Nathan St Cyr 49:32

And so okay, but I'm still I'm still spinning off the numbers. I'm sorry. So I gotta, I gotta go back. Okay. Because I've my mind my well, when my mind won't stop until I just dig dig a little bit deeper. You just said that you've got this very specific target, and then you like went, okay, so there's 500 of these. Then you went and said, but then we go in, we take that list of 500, and then we scrub it to the ones that have already done it, right? And then I'm like, okay, well, that's probably a pretty, maybe, maybe 25%. I don't know, right? And so I started going, okay, so now we got 125. You want to do one of these a month. That means that you gotta, you gotta close one out of 10 of these. And then I'm like, but your whole goal here is to go scope, to go, to go scale this model in creating all of these. And if it's if it's dependent on this type of situation, that seems like a very, very low number of opportunity to me.

Bill Graf 50:32

Well, what you're what you're leaving out is it's five root of cork. The beauty of venture capital funding is that it just keeps happening, right? So that every quarter, that many more deals have happened. And so we don't have to close 10%. And I think your numbers are generally correct, right? If it's 500 companies, you say maybe 25% of them are the ones who had offsites, that that feels directionally correct. But that's how many new companies come into our pipeline every quarter. So we really only need to close three out of the 125, not 12 out of the 125. But yeah, it's it's a risk. If we had 100 hotels, could we keep them all that full all the time? I have no idea, but I do know that'd be a fantastic problem for me to have.

Nathan St Cyr 51:09

Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely. To me, I think it's okay refining from a scale standpoint is going beyond just that one very, very specific niche in identifying where are similarities to that, other than just the venture capitalists. It's just my thought.

Bill Graf 51:30

Yeah, no, you and you can and just to be clear, I don't want to suggest that we do corporate offsites to the exclusion of other sort of group sales like weddings and bachelor parties and yoga retreats and things like that. But what we have found is that the corporate offsites are by far our highest margin. They're the least price sensitive. Um, they're not turning around and reselling this. It's oftentimes not their own money. They just want to get their team down there and not have to worry about it because otherwise it's gonna be somebody's job, that company, to spend a whole quarter, 40 hours a week, planning some event. So those are our favorite clients from a margin standpoint, but that's not to say that there are other fantastic clients that fall into some of those other buckets. And again, what's fun as we build out a portfolio of properties is that certain properties are gonna be better suited to certain audience, either based on their amenities or their location or their distance to an international airport or their climate.

Michael Russell 52:19

All right. Well, I'm having all these thoughts that are going bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. So, like, I look, I love Costa Rica and that's amazing. And, you know, all the other countries that you have and you're building a great product. I'm also thinking about domestically, because again, I'm fearful of investing abroad. It is what it is. Okay, not everyone has the same sentiment, but that's how I feel. So I'm looking at like, okay, well, I mean, when I scour Coastar and I look at all these cool properties and I go, the vacancy rate is so low. How do I fill these up? And then all of a sudden now I'm starting to encounter people that are that are building these lifestyle boutiques resorts that have this, what do you call it, experiential things? So it's not just corporate retreats, it's family reunions, it's weddings like you're describing, like it's wellness, could be bachelor parties. And so I don't know, I'm just spitting out like potential guests that would book as a group. But what really I keep going back to my mind is okay, Clay, what can Clay do? And I don't know much about I know nothing about Clay, honestly, but what I do know is that AI is getting so good that the idea and the concept of searching social media in general, whether it's LinkedIn or Facebook or what have you, there's presumably some software, Clay or another one, that is gonna have the ability to go and monitor what people are posting about and then market to those people so that the person that had a family reunion is probably gonna want to have another one. And the person that went on a retreat for uh whatever their work or however, like using that concept. Like I got really excited when you started saying that because then it opens up a lot more opportunity in areas where there are occupancy issues, but you can counter that with large group bookings and then understanding how to market towards those people using technology and AI to be able to identify potential guest group group bookings is very exciting to me. Who actually calls these people? Because at the end of the day, the technology gives you the info. Someone's got to close them, someone's got to pick up the phone and be human and say, all right, our place is awesome. Come and book with us.

unknown 54:23

Yeah.

Bill Graf 54:23

So I mean, we have we have a woman on our team. Her name's Ava. She's French, she's uh 25 years old, and she's sort of been with us, I don't know, since almost day one. I mean, I knew her before we even opened up the hotel. And so she falls right into our target demographic. She lives and breeds what we're doing. She has been there to actually fulfill a handful of these corporate offsites and weddings and things like that. And so we have her calling people because she knows exactly what we're we're selling and she's got a ton of credibility. She can get people on the phone and she sort of kind of looks like them and sounds like them and and and jives with them for life and more specific expression and generally brings credibility to what we're doing and that we're a real person and not just a platform, right? And she can say, look, if you come down here, like I'm here, I'm in Costa Rica, I live and breathe this. Uh, and again, for a price, go back to Bashar's high margin thing. You know, if you buy our gold package corporate offsite, ABA says to you, I will be there. I'm the safety net. I'm the I will personally be there. You will have my WhatsApp number. And if you want laser engraved coconuts at three in the morning, like I am going to be the one that's gonna go do that for you. And so for us, I think that vertical integration that we're not just a platform, we're not like Airbnb for corporate retreats or anything like that, or Airbnb for bachelor parties. That when you talk to Ava, you're actually gonna meet Ava. If you want to meet the site staff, we when the guy picks you up, it's a van with our logo on it and a vinyl wrap. The guy is wearing our t-shirt. He takes you to our property. We control cradle to grave, the whole experience. And I think when when Ava gets people on the phone and says that, that's really the differentiator that allows us to win business that like the catering manager at the the West end just isn't going to be able to win. Did you just say cradle to grave? Yes.

Nathan St Cyr 56:00

Oh, that was freaking awesome. Cradle to grave soup to nuts. No, I love it. That's uh that was freaking the guest journey, cradle to grave.

Michael Russell 56:12

So, for investors that have listened to this and been inspired by you and are thinking, What? I would like to invest abroad. I like the idea of owning a piece of paradise in Latin America. The lifestyle seems awesome. The the pure vita lifestyle, the the opportunity, the financials seem appealing. Like there's definitely an upside to go and make some money investing abroad. What are some recommendations that you would give to someone that maybe wants to pursue something that's similar to what you're doing?

Bill Graf 56:40

Yeah, I mean, if somebody just wants exposure to a market like Costa Rica, but doesn't feel like maybe taking the plunge or necessarily rolling up their sleeves, we're actually going to be kicking off a fundraise for our Wanta Verde location early next year. We've structured it with American investors in mind, folks who have not done a ton of international investing. So the investment in a Delaware L LC, you just get a K1. It's a totally passive investment. And it's a great way to kind of get eyes on one of these properties. You get all of our investor updates. Obviously, you get direct access to me and my team. And it's a way to test the waters, maybe in a more passive capacity, but with a lower check size before deciding whether or not making a direct investment in a hard asset in a third world country is something that you want to do.

Michael Russell 57:23

Yeah, I love that. I think prior to us, Nathan and myself purchasing our own portfolio properties, we we have each invested into syndications. And uh for me, it was a great way to really learn some of the nuts and bolts, get to be a fly on the wall, observe, okay, what do I, what do I, what are the takeaways that I could apply when I go on my own? So for someone that has an interest in investing abroad, I definitely recommend partner with someone that's done it before. You're gonna avoid a lot of mistakes. So if someone wants to connect with you, let's say they either want to just follow your journey or perhaps to maybe they do want to invest with you on your next fund, how can someone connect with you?

Bill Graf 58:01

Yeah, the best way is honestly just add me on LinkedIn and shoot me a message there.

Michael Russell 58:05

Okay. So we'll put in your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, and you'll probably put in all your other socials. So if someone wants to check out Onda and see what you're up to, we'll put all the links in the show notes.

Bill Graf 58:17

Yeah, I mean, one of the things we could do too, we can give a we can do a little promo code for your listeners if everybody actually wants to come and kick the tires in person. Always happy to host folks and share a boozy coponut or a coffee or a beer or a hamburger. Yeah.

Michael Russell 58:29

Hell yeah. Cool. All right, Bill. Well, this has been great. Thanks so much for being on the show for our listeners. We're gonna wrap this episode up of the Hotel Investor Playbook. We are Mike and Nate. He is Bill Graff, and we are checking out. We'll catch you again next week. Aloha,