The Hotel Investor Playbook
Welcome to The Hotel Investor Playbook, hosted by real estate investor and hospitality operator Michael Russell. Michael is the co-founder of Malama Capital and Howzit Hostels, and has built a personal real estate portfolio exceeding $20 million.
With an operator-first mindset, Michael brings a practical perspective to hotel investing. On the show, he breaks down what it actually takes to scale from short-term rentals into boutique hotels, covering deal sourcing, operations, capital strategy, and risk.
Each week, Michael shares real lessons from the field as he builds toward a $400 million real estate business, giving listeners an honest look at the decisions, challenges, and strategies behind the growth. Subscribe and follow along as he documents the journey in real time.
The Hotel Investor Playbook
The Hotel-to-Apartment Strategy That Turned $8.5M Into $18.9M in 19 Months | Ryan Sudeck E78
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What if the most overlooked apartment deal in your market is already built, it's just flagged as a hotel?
In this episode, you'll discover how a valuation gap between hotels and multifamily creates forced equity of 40 to 50% before you change a single wall, and why most investors completely miss it.
A CEO who has completed over 30 hotel-to-apartment conversions across six states joins us to break down the exact strategy his firm has used to generate a 20% annualized return since inception. Ryan Sudeck and his team at Sage Investment Group turned an $8.5M distressed hotel into $18.9M in 19 months with a 38% annualized return and have since scaled the model to over 3,000 units and 500 investors.
In this episode, you'll discover:
- Why a hotel trading at a 12 cap automatically becomes more valuable the moment you convert it to residential, and how to calculate the forced equity before you buy
- The exact buy box Sage uses: room count, location signals, and the zoning step that most investors skip, which kills deals
- How to identify hotels in the "death spiral" before they hit the market and why Sage rarely buys on-market
- The invasive due diligence process they use to eliminate budget blowouts behind the walls
- Why the evergreen fund model outperforms syndications for this strategy, and how distributions work from day one
- The community impact case study in Tacoma that took a street responsible for 10% of Washington state murders to zero violent crime
If you're a hotel investor, a multifamily operator, or someone sitting on capital looking for a differentiated real estate strategy, this episode will change how you look at every distressed property you drive past. Don't miss the valuation math breakdown in the first ten minutes; it's genuinely one of the clearest arbitrage setups we've had on this show.
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Connect with Ryan Sudeck
Website: http://sageinvestment.com
Email: ryan@sageinvestment.group
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansudeck/
Connect with Michael on Instagram or LinkedIn.
Email Us at info@hotelinvestorplaybook.com
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