.png)
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 Travel Influencer With 1.6M Instagram Followers Who Became a Hotel Developer | Jake Snow E88
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Most hotel investors build the product first and spend years chasing an audience to fill it. This guest flipped the order entirely.
In this episode, Michael Russell sits down with a travel content creator who built a following of over a million people, then used years of staying in the world's best hotels to figure out exactly what makes a property worth sharing, and designed his own around it. That audience helped his first Bali hotel hit 80% occupancy in month one and pay back its full construction cost in 18 months, entirely self-funded. He now runs a 250-person company raising capital directly from that same audience to build boutique hotels across Bali and South Africa.
In this episode, you'll discover:
- How building an audience before building the asset flips the usual risk profile on a hotel investment
- What years of documenting five-star hotels taught him about what actually drives bookings
- Why he skipped OTAs almost entirely, and what that did to margins that run 40 to 60%
- How he's using fractional ownership to raise capital from his own community instead of institutional money
- What it took to scale from one Bali boutique hotel to hotels on two continents
- The one red flag he says every investor should check before wiring money into any hospitality fund
If you think an audience is just for influencers chasing likes, this episode will show you how far it can go as a substitute for a marketing budget, and where the real risk still lives.
If you found value in this episode, take 30 seconds to leave us a review here. It helps more people find the podcast and keeps us bringing on great guests.
Connect with Jake Snow:
Website is ventore.com
Their latest project is polarity.ventore.com
Instagram: @ventoregroup and @mariefeandjakesnow
Connect with Michael on Instagram or LinkedIn.
Email Us at info@hotelinvestorplaybook.com
Visit the Hotel Investor Playbook Instagram