Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast
This show is for the builders and backers of boutique hotels.
Hosted by operators who made the jump from short-term rentals to boutique hotels, this podcast documents the real journey of acquiring, renovating, and operating boutique hospitality assets.
We share lessons learned in real time and sit down with experienced operators, lenders, designers, and industry professionals who bring practical insight, hard-won advice, and unfiltered perspective. If you’re serious about boutique hotels, hospitality operations, or scaling beyond short-term rentals, this show is for you.
Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast
19 - Stop Chasing Pretty Properties: The Ugly Hotel Strategy That Actually Pays Off with Joel Weigle
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In this episode, Joel Weigel shares his journey from short-term rentals to building boutique hotels and experiential destinations. Learn how to acquire, operate, and scale properties while creating unforgettable guest experiences.
Connect with Joel:
Find him on Instagram: @joelweigle
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I just built this guy a plant and he got the 10x return. What is this? And so I started really understanding okay, I want to start doing stuff for myself at that point.
SPEAKER_01Hey everybody, I'm Adam Wallace, and I'm here with my co-host Micah Thomas.
SPEAKER_00We're short-term rental operators who made the jump into boutique hotels.
SPEAKER_01And we're in it right now, raising capital, renovating a 50-room property. We're figuring it out as we go.
SPEAKER_00This is the Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast, and these are secrets.
SPEAKER_01Welcome in, everyone, to another episode of the official Boutique Hotel Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Walls. This is a show dedicated to helping people jump from short-term rental hotels into the boutique hotel space. Luckily, it's not just me. Let me bring in my mister from another sister, Micah Thomas. Brother, how are you? And any updates on this wild hotel chase that we're doing?
SPEAKER_00Let me tell you, I got a lot of stuff going on. I'm having dreams. You can even call them nightmares about spreadsheets with the infinite spreadsheet being the final ball. So that's working on me, and we're getting good and bad news from general contractors. We just got an email like seconds ago.
SPEAKER_01Do you want to just read this just so we can give it a taste? Just a little preview of what it's like if you jumped into this wild world of hotels. Again, very sexy on Instagram, but on a daily basis, we're getting all sorts of fun inbox jams like this one. So do you want to read off maybe a little highlight of that? We don't need to disclose who it's from.
SPEAKER_00Yep, for sure. I'm talking to a general contractor to place a bid on the property for some renovations. And they decided they didn't want to bid on the project. And I asked if they could give me a general idea of what their bid may be like, just so we can talk to partners, investors, so on and so forth. So they said, hi, Micah, as a placeholder, uh, I recommend targeting about $1.875 million. Uh, this accounts for about $25,000 per key plus $500,000 allocated for common space remodel and FFE or furniture. It's possible the total could come in lower, but I would advise carrying at least 10% contingency to account for unforeseen conditions. So this was an email we got today. Um, then after asking for an itemized bid, they decided they didn't want to give it because it was likely we weren't going to use them and it would be a waste of time. So that's the great news we got today. I love that, man. And just remind listeners, where's our budget today? Man, we wanted for renovation remodel, we wanted to budget about 500 to 750,000 for just remodeling, paint interior, exterior, remodeling the back from the floors, things like that. And then a little bit more for furniture and outdoor amenity spaces. But this is basically coming in at a million dollars more, 1.1 million dollars more than what we actually budgeted. So that's a little bit have that in the check here. I wish I thought you were just gonna cut a check, honestly. I thought that's what was happening here. One day, not there yet, but one day. But such is life in the boutique hotel space. We'll keep moving forward. Luckily, we got bids from several contractors, so this doesn't change anything on our end. So that's good news.
SPEAKER_01I love it, man. Thank you for that update. Good to see you as always. It's time now to bring in our special guest today, one of the coaches of Boutique Hotel Secrets. When I first met him, I didn't even know that he was an instructor. I just met him as, oh, here's a dude, and he went to a hotel with me and he underwrote it. And then later on, I find out he's a mini Elon Musk and he has all these talents and all these businesses. I went to Banff at a mastermind that I didn't even know he was in, and I've known the guy for months. So we got to bring in Joel Wiggle. Joel, pleasure to see you, sir. Thanks for making time. Golf claps all around. Welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. Appreciate you guys having me. Good to see you guys as always. Appreciate everything and the high words for me as well.
SPEAKER_01Amazing, man. We've had Rajmi on the show. We've had Isaac on the show. Again, they're the three pillars when we think about boutique hotel secrets. How do you run a great operations team? How do you renovate or reposition or develop properties? And again, you were the king of acquisition. I think a lot of first-time BHS students start with Coach Joel to go, where should I even start? I remember Micah was looking nationwide before he met you. And within a matter of months, we've got this thing called a buy box. We're talking with brokers, we're underwriting deals, we're even coming up with creative scenarios. So, anyways, we'd love to explore this, not just on this podcast, but over time. Just again, how you acquire or support people in acquiring hotels. But maybe we just start at the beginning, man, give people a taste of like your backstory, how you found real estate, how you use your day job and your previous education to parlay that into what you're doing today. And at some point, we got to talk about that private island.
SPEAKER_02Of course, we always have to. Yeah, so my background was in engineering, and I was blessed to be one of the first engineers at this private chemical company. And so with any small business, and they started asking me to do everything. And so naturally I started setting I wanted to take on projects and I started overseeing the larger industrial projects. I was in Arkansas and I did up to a $5 million project that I was overseeing as a GC. And I was like, man, this is absolutely huge. And then they asked me, they said, Do you want to build something from the ground up? And I was like, I would love to. I moved out to West Texas and I built a $38 million chemical plant from the ground up out there. And it was a ton of learning lessons. Industrials completely different. And my trigger that really got me into this is I helped build a manufacturing facility right after it got up and running. The CEO sold it and they sold it for $350 million. We built it 30. Yeah. A little bit, a little bit of an increase. And I was working 100-hour weeks for multiple years. And I sat there and I was like, I just built this guy a plant and he got the 10x return. What is this? And so I started really understanding. Okay, I want to start doing stuff for myself at that point. On the side, I kept in the development world and I started buying short-term rentals on the side. I didn't even plan for it to be a short-term rental. I didn't know what that was, but I bought a place for myself to go visit whenever I was bored or I needed a vacation. And I said, let me make some money on the side. Learned about the STR world. I was very data-driven being in the manufacturing world, especially when we look at conveyor belts, every single second counts. I'm looking at the motor and looking at the speed of how can I increase it by one second. So I got into the real estate world and I started assessing how I can be as dialed in data-wise as I was in the manufacturing space. And I got into the numbers, started really diving into renovations and revenue management. And my first property, I did a little bit over 100% cash on cash return on my first property I ever did. And I was like, wait a second, there must be something here. So right after that, I started trying to buy anything and everything that I could that I thought made sense in this one area in New Mexico. And I bought 18 short-term rentals in 18 months, is what I did. So I just really kicked it in. After that, new problems arose. And now I started thinking about the scalability. Now I had 18 properties and I was raising money for some of single-family homes. And I thought, okay, how can I actually scale this and bring my own internal team? And I found this property that I loved. And I actually, my first time I was ever in this town, I was like, that's a property I want to own one day. Two months later, after I decided I wanted to find a hotel, it just hit the market. And my real estate agent, who I told them that I wanted that property one day, my real estate agent said, You remember that property you said you wanted? I was like, Yes. And they said, It just hit the market. Put an offer together and made an offer. We bought it, we raised capital for it. And then now I was an 18-unit boutique hotel, but it came with a staff. So it already had cleaners, it had a general manager, and it had a front desk manager, and it had that. So I owned 20 units at that time. I just bought an 18-unit boutique hotel, but I was able to build a staff for all of those units. So I had 30 plus units that we were managing all at one time. And I just started realizing the economies of scale for me to truly build that internal team was able to take me to the next level. After that, that's whenever I fell in love with the economies of scale and said, let's just keep going bigger and let's keep this hotel train going. And I didn't know I didn't know anybody else doing hotels at that time. So it was a lot of trial and error.
SPEAKER_01That is great. Dude, dude, most people just read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and go, oh, employee, investor, that's it. This guy goes out and builds chemical plants, manufacturing plants, a portfolio of 18 houses in 18 months, gets a staff of 30 people, doesn't know anyone doing this. This is an insane story, Joel. Yeah, that is quite remarkable.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Everything I've done was all trial and error, and that was it. So most of my learning I move really quick. I understand if I can make a mistake, there's no such thing as a true mistake. I can overcome that and have a learning lesson. So I was making mistakes really quick, but I was adapting to it really quick to overcome that as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I want to touch on economies of scale. You can't have economies of scale without hiring and firing people. And if anybody knows how to hire and fire somebody, I would say it's probably you. You've done a little bit of both throughout your day. So could you touch just a little bit on how many people you may have hired or fired in your day and the experience you've gained along the way to get the right people in place for your business?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I'm closing in on 190 hires in my career right now. So quite a bit of personal hires. I've probably done three times the amount of interviews, I would guess. I haven't tracked that, but I have a whole tracker of every game that I've ever hired. I want to get to 200 pretty soon. So with that, once again, another trial and error. Some of my first hires were not bad on their side. It was bad on me from a leadership side. And setting expectations is one of the biggest things. I set expectations before somebody's even hired when they're in the interview. The biggest thing is sometimes we have the right people that are amazing in their technical skills. It might be the wrong fit with my culture, with me, with our work environment, of how we want to work together. So for me to be upfront, honest, and setting that expectations is one of the biggest things. And I've had a lot of people that, to be honest, I scare in the interview and then we don't go proceed any further, but it saves both of our time. So it's taken a long time for me to really build this out. But setting expectations of what I'm looking for, especially if I'm buying a hotel, another great learning lesson for me is they've been built into this own expectation that they've been working at this for five years and they think they know everything about it, which is great. They know everything about the property, they don't know everything about the KPIs you're looking to hit. They don't know about the margins you want, want, they don't know about the efficiency you're trying to drive here. And so most of the time when I see issues and failures from individuals buying a hotel, is they have this vision that they want to make all this efficiency. They're not communicating it properly with the team, and there's this disconnect instead. And because there's the disconnect, it ends out to where the owner is just raging all the time that they're not getting to the expectations that they want. As we're hiring or as we're taking on a new team, it's all about setting the expectations with them, is the biggest thing. The last thing I'll say about that is there's so many people, and there's nothing wrong with it, but there's a difference of a leader and a visionary versus a follower and a worker. And so a lot of times, us as leaders, we think everybody can think like me. Everybody can be the critical thinker, everybody can be the person who's going to solve all these problems. It's not always the case. So we need to be building out these procedures, the SOPs. We need to be building out their whole entire job description and how they can grow and develop in their role as well for success. What does true success look like in their role? And that's my biggest thing from a leadership side is when somebody comes on week one, they know what Joel looks for success in their exact role. And that's the biggest learning lesson that I can give probably two people is make sure that they know what you're looking for success.
SPEAKER_01Nice, man. Yeah, I like that distinction between kind of leader and follower. I think of David Green, who got famous for a while on the Bigger Pockets podcast. I actually bought the house that I'm sitting in right now from David. Nice right when he was in Brentwood. So an amazing guy. And I loved hearing him talk about how when employees complain, it's like, hang on a second. Someone found you the customers, brought them to the facility, set you up with all of the materials to do the job. All you need to do is fulfillment. How is that the hard part? Like someone, if you peel back any business, I don't care if it's HVAC, if it's a hotel, if it's name that business. There was some entrepreneur, visionary leader who did a lot of the heavy lifting to secure the right teams, to set up the right SOPs, to make sure that person's successful. Ultimately, right, it's creating the culture that's gonna help people rise or potentially sink, and maybe even self-eliminate themselves from the job. I want to go back though to kind of like origin story of like, how did you connect with Mike Shogren, Emmanuel Pawnee? We mentioned Rashmi, Isaac. Like, I think you got in through the boardroom and then maybe you splinter selled off with BHS, but maybe we could hear origin story for you. What attracted you about this group? How did you find your tribe here? Obviously, I am in love with this group, so I'm a little biased, but I want to hear your experience. How did you find this group and why do you stay here?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, good question. So, when I, as I mentioned before, a lot of it was trial and error. And it took a lot for me personally to realize that there are shortcuts that can get made. And the shortcuts are learning from other people's experience. And most of what I realized is I was reading books left and right. And me reading books was me learning from other people's experience. But then all of the books were written 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Things changed in the industry. And I love reading books. I still read books all the time. But I started just realizing I didn't even know a mastermind existed, had no clue any of this was out there. And so I came across a podcast with Shogrin. I listened to it and I just really resonated with more of the morals of what they were doing. And so I said, look, if I'm actually gonna elevate myself and compress time where I'm not having to do trial and error all the time, and I can just ask somebody a question and what might take me five hours, I can ask a question, it takes 30 minutes and save my time. That's the most valuable thing to me right now. So I started doing some digging research, came across their podcast, set up a call with them. They originally said they wanted to put me in L STR secrets, and I told them my portfolio. I come from an engineering background, I had so many SOPs. I said, look, I don't know y'all's SOP vault. I probably have more than you guys, though. And that's what I straight up said to them. But I knew I needed the community. So I talked to them about the hotel, the assets that I had. And that's whenever a new person came in and said, Wait, I think you actually should be more in the boardroom. As soon as I started hearing about the other people in there doing much higher level things, it clicked. I said, I need to be with people who are making me think bigger and elevating myself as well. Ever since I joined that community, the people I talk to the most are in that community today.
SPEAKER_01So if you're getting value from this, follow the show and share it with one person who's ready to move beyond short-term rentals.
SPEAKER_00And if you want to learn more about the boutique hotel secrets community, the link is in the show notes.
SPEAKER_02That that's the biggest thing that still keeps me there as well. I was just with one of the students in there today who's looking at a deal in California and as one of the coolest projects that I've seen. It was so amazing, so cool. And to go through different projects, learn from them, and open the community up to where I can still learn from them, even though I'm a coach with them. I still learn from all of the students all the time. It's my favorite thing. So to be able to build the community, have that network that that's my closest people I talk to nowadays, it's still so enjoyable and so fun to be around all of you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love that. Shojrun says it all the time. You got to find your tribe, like whatever that means for you, but find like-minded individuals that are trying to accomplish the same, if not greater things that you guys want to accomplish. And that's ultimately how you grow and get the success that you want. So I definitely love that. Two things I want to bring up. One, we'd be remiss if we didn't talk just a little bit about your island, but also you have a great brand that you're really building. And I would love to talk more about the missing brand, the missing hotel, and just the experience that you're giving to guests and how you're what I think attempting to go worldwide. You might correct me where I'm wrong, but I just love your brand. I would love to hear more about that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'll start at missing hotel because it's going to roll into the island perfectly. We have a property outside of Austin, Texas. It's 96 acres. We have 11 units there. We're actively building 19 more. So we'll be at 30 around next May of this time. And the concept behind it is find what's missing from yourself. So right now there's a big trend in the wellness space. We're not only physical wellness, we're a lot of mental and spiritual wellness at all to come find yourself. So when you look at our guest avatar, it's a lot of people who are like myself, who was a grinder and working and hadn't taken vacation. And there's terrible internet, there's terrible service, but it's there actually strategically for us for you to go out there and truly disconnect. I remember some of the best points. I'm a big hiker and backpacker, and some of the best points of my career was actually me out there in the woods with no cell service. And I would have a journal and a notebook, and I would get inspiration and I'd be thinking, and there's no distractions. And suddenly I'd come back and I'd be so dialed in and efficient. But just taking the relaxation of that mental break was so powerful to me that I wanted to provide a hospitality feature for that as well. So it's not only the physical wellness, but it truly is find what's missing from yourself. We get a lot of couples out there. So a lot of it's find what's missing in your relationship. We've helped a lot of relationships as well. I'll give one story that was in a guest book for us. They straight up, and I don't know if I can say it on the podcast, but they straight up were like, I haven't had sex with my husband in five years. And we came here and we reconnected for the first time in five years. And she was like, it was absolutely magical. So to be able to go and just disconnect, be with one another, we build it as romantic as possible. There's hiking trails, we have cows, we have so much different activities, but the activities are intended to bond with one another or bond with yourself. We have places for you to go out and journal. We've had some musicians come out there and do songwriting retreats out there. So just go out there and truly find yourself and find what's missing from yourself and ideally leave a better person than you were whenever you came, is going to be the best thing. So we love the impact that we've made on people. And I love the brand of find what's missing from yourself. And we are looking to take that across the nation and ideally internationally as well. We have a couple of things in the works right now, internationally, that we're going through some underwriting on. And so this ties into the next thing that I'll say is if you ever get the opportunity to buy an island, it is amazing for investors. Investors love work. So that's the biggest thing right there is investors love it. But we are gonna rebrand it. We can legally change the name. And we do want to call it missing island. It does sound a little bit sketchy that you might go there and be missing, but the whole concept is to now not only you disconnecting from the internet, I also am thinking about how do you disconnect from the mainland? You're off the ocean, so it's off the coast of Georgia, and you're truly away from the mainland. So you can't even see it. It's far enough, you're just seeing the ocean. That's a true disconnect. That how can I build this extra level of disconnect for us? And so we're going through the process. The permitting process on an island is way tougher than you can imagine. So it's taken us a little bit of time, still going through the phases. We have a couple approvals through it, but really trying to build that out to be the ultimate connection for people. We have 40 acres, we're looking at 12 units, doing nine units mainland. We're gonna do three units that will be very cool and unique, that will be actually in the ocean. There's a lot of operational things that we have to look at there because I have to get a captain to have people come out there and we have people staying out there now. Then, if you're staying literally in the ocean, we are watching the weather every single day to make sure people are safe. So there's a lot of things that I never thought I would have to worry about and look at. But we want to put that as part of the brand as well because I see that as even the next level of find what's missing from yourself where I can truly disconnect from everything that's around us, and we're not even on the mainland of America at that point.
SPEAKER_01Man, I haven't seen many org charts with captain or a skipper or boat navigator on the orange right. Very unique structure. And yeah, thank you for giving us a little bit of insight. And maybe in the show notes, you can link to whatever incense or candles that you're using in the missing hotel to spark marital interactions like that. Uh I I want to pause here just for a second to talk about I think the category. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fairly or unfairly, experiential hospitality. I think Isaac French, I think of others in the space, I think what you're doing with Missing, there's this fantastic narrative story. It's Connecting people with nature. It's hitting more than just one cents or two cents. I'm not just looking for a crash pad to lay down and then go off on my adventure. Can you talk a little bit about why experiential hospitality kind of makes sense for you and why you think this might even be the most attractive, let's call it submarket, even within boutique hotels? Because I think it's different.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I and I know I've told you guys before, but whenever I have my place in New Mexico, once again, as a learning by trial, I started investing into the renovation of the units itself because I was seeing everybody else do that. Everybody else is making it boutique, they're making it cool, they're making a hip. And I started doing that and I put money into the interior. And I said, why is our revenue not going higher? I don't get it. I just put a bunch of money into it and still not going higher. Then I was like, all right, so I said, there's a couple of amenity things I want to do outside. I started putting money into the exterior, and suddenly the revenue absolutely increased and the occupancy increased. And I was like, why, whenever I put something outside, are is it is it increasing way more than inside? And I realized the guest avatar that I had there love the outdoor, they love the nature. And it's a newer market that when we looked at it for so long, most of it of just standard hotels, you're going into a hotel room, but you're actually going somewhere else. So I'm just using that as a true stay where I'm going to a national park, I'm going to the city, I'm going somewhere else. So to think about if I invested money into the outdoors where I'm not sitting in a hotel room and staring at a screen on the TV, but I can be right along the beautiful river and I can enjoy, I can hear the trees, I can smell the mountain air, whatever that might be. I'm actually getting a higher dollar per room. I'm getting a higher occupancy, and I'm also getting people who enjoy being outside that has been this market that nobody's been touching unless you have a rooftop balcony and that's it. And that's why rooftops were so popular in standard hotels for so long. So that's what made me start to realize people love nature. They love the outdoors. I'm a huge national park fan. I want to travel to all of them. And so I started realizing that and studying a little bit more of these more niched properties that are more landscape-based, they are outdoor-based. And looking at missing hotels, they are very beautiful units, but they're very small. It's the same size as a standard hotel room would be. But all the money we're investing is really in the exterior. Your decks that you're staying on are more expensive than the unit itself. So I'm putting more into a space that you can be outside in. And you have your hot tub, you have your coal plunge, you have your sauna, you have all of these things, whatever that might be. And people are enjoying being outside rather than just indoors. And it's something that I like to look at myself as well. Whenever I travel, I look at where do I want to stay and where do I want to travel. And I want something that's built in and I see a beautiful landscape. I see the nature. I'm built in with the nature. That's something that I like to look for. So as we've been going through trial and error, as I've been doing some studying, that's where a lot of that comes from is really understanding where's my best return on investment that I can put money into the exterior that affects 20 units, rather than I have to put money in unit by unit that affects one unit instead. So getting into the landscape side, I love landscape. And for me to be able to build beautiful landscape, we're building a man-made pond. We just finished a gorgeous waterfall that's going to be very Instagram worthy. That is a place that I want to hang out on. To build all that is so fun and so cool, but it also makes me feel like I'm in nature, even when I am at my hospitality place. We have around 50% of our guests don't leave the site at all. So now if I can build something where they're not even leaving the site, I suddenly build my own destination. So I'm not building the hospitality of the stay, I'm building a destination which is attracting people to me rather than I'm gonna stay here while I go visit the wineries. I'm gonna stay here while I go to town. We're truly building that destination. And for me to do landscape hospitality or experiential hospitality where everything you want to do is right there on a resort, that's the most fun and exciting thing for me.
SPEAKER_00That is, first of all, absolutely amazing. I don't think this is something that you would recommend to a beginner for sure, but I think that it just captures the full essence of a boutique hospitality or a boutique hotel because people are coming, like you said, for an experience. They're not getting the same thing they would get in your standard Marriott or Hilton. This is something that you truly cannot get anywhere else. And I think your brand is capturing that very well. I want to transition into acquisition, and you may have two parts of this answer. The first question is uh, what do you look for when you're in acquisition mode and you want to acquire new property? And then how would you suggest someone who's looking to transition from short-term rentals to the boutique hotel space? How would you suggest they look at a property?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Tell everybody and you guys know you start with your buy box, and your buy box needs to consist of what are my goals? So, do I want a cash flow goal? Do I want 10K a month? Do I want value add on the back end that my rent innovation is going to give me a million dollars on an exit? I need to start with what that goal is because I can start reverse engineering a little bit more of what the property needs to look like. I can start building in the operational site to where I tell a lot of people nine unit hotel, 12 unit hotel is way too small for what you guys' goals are. Both of you guys, we talked about that at the beginning as well. Is we have certain goals. I need to make sure the property can fulfill my goals. So I want you to start with your goals. Let's figure out some of the operational as we go through the buy box. How much renovation am I capable to take on without a partner? Okay, if it needs to be big enough, now I need to look at a partner, which might need to make it even bigger because now I'm splitting equity, I'm splitting cash flow. And then how much operational can I take on myself? Do I need funds that are going to cover general manager? Do I need an equity split that I'm going to have somebody overseeing operations or asset manager? So I want to understand what do I feel comfortable taking on? The reason why I love partnerships and you guys are in partnerships, reason why I love that is so I don't have to do everything because I don't want to have to do everything. I want to have to do what I'm really good at. I want to partner with somebody who is good at something that I'm bad at. And I want to find that partnership who is a better pro-con with each other that works out. And so for most people, I just want them to start there when we then the next thing is choosing the market. This is probably everybody's biggest question. And to be honest, I tell people I don't care what market it is, choose three by random for all I care. And go to Crexie, go to Loopnet. And if you go there, there's always a broker in that bottom right corner. And I want you to try getting information from the broker. I want you to underwrite the property, whether it works or doesn't work. I want you to have a communication with the broker. What you're going to realize is you're going to go through five different properties, none of them works. And you're going to talk to the broker and say, Does anything work in this market? And they're going to say, it's it's tough. And so then now it's time to go to the next market every single day. And I did it for months. And it's what got me better at being an underwriter and also built the relationships with both, which both of you guys did an amazing job at building the relationships with brokers, where suddenly brokers start sending you deals because brokers are out there to close a deal, and most people ghost them. I've done it in the past as well, but most people don't talk to them or they don't give them feedback. And so the biggest thing for myself and for other people, give them the feedback, tell them what you like and what you don't like and how you can improve off of it. And then their job is just find something that works in your buy box and they'll start shooting it your way. So my goals personally are different than what a lot of people's goals are. Most people transitioning from STRs over. I want them to start with why do they want to come into hotels? Did they just hear it was good for money? Is it because they have operational headaches and they can actually build a team together? Let's start there, let's reverse engineer and let's just start talking to brokers. Let's underwrite, let's practice, shoot stuff to somebody else who's good with data. If you're not, and let's just go through it together and we can figure out what works, what doesn't. And we'll start finding attractive markets. And you guys have found attractive markets yourselves. And it just takes time. It's not something that I can give you a top 10 Joel list of markets you need to go after. Let's just find something that works for what we're looking for.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's great. And my guess is after looking at hundreds of deals yourself and then advising or looking over the shoulder of hundreds more from students about what works, what doesn't. Do you any shortcuts or tips and tricks or like little things that you can pick up on to very quickly disqualify property? Because I think this is really an exercise, and 99 out of 100 deals aren't going to work. So, Ken, how do you suss out what's the signal from the noise? So again, I know you're a data guy, you like the algorithms, you're always trying to build a better machine. What have you learned about maybe any shortcuts to quickly tell if this is worth pursuing and spending more time on, or I gotta just kill this, cut my losses, throw it in the loss pile, and continue the search.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the biggest thing, the easiest thing for me, honestly, is most properties will say when it was last renovated. And so I see a lot of them that says recently renovated in 2023, as if that's a good thing. And most people who are transitioning STRs and they say, Oh, I'm so overwhelmed. I need to find something fairly turnkey. Yeah, it's so hard to find something to pencil out like that when it's turnkey. We can increase from an operational increase or from a value add increase. I recommend everybody, I don't care what your skill level is. I want both. I want you to be operationally better. I want you to have the value add component as well. So if you see something that says, oh, this was just recently renovated, that's a turn off for me right away. I want something that looks like garbage. I want something that we can have to put a little bit of work in. And if it's big enough, then I can go partner with somebody who has the development and construction component to ultimately help us out. So my biggest thing for most people, if somebody shows me something that's newly renovated, I can tell them it's not gonna work right now. They're gonna be asking for sky high prices. And that's not something most of the people here are looking for. If you just are betting on appreciation and value add, you definitely can work on that if you want to sit on it and hold it for 10 years. But most people are looking for some cash flow too. And it's very hard to find something turnkey nowadays in with something that is ready to go right now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's great, especially. I know for me in particular when I was transitioning from short-term rentals to hotels, the numbers get big really quick. So you start like second guessing yourself and you say, Let me find something that looks good because it's less work that I have to do, and I don't have to go into this with a partner. It's a lot easier to take down. But those are actually the deals you want to stay the furthest away from because, like you say, they don't pencil, they're a lot harder to manage and they're usually overpriced. So I guess with that being said, I know we're getting close to the end of the show. I wanted to ask, is there any advice you would want to give someone who may be scared to take the leap or maybe have thoughts about transitioning to boutique hotels from short-term rentals that they could use?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, my number one piece of advice is to know that you don't have to do everything. The goal of joining communities like this is find somebody who has a skill set different than yours, just like you guys were able to do. I put people into four quadrants, is what I like. So you have your deal finder, you have your operations guy, you have your construction, and you have your capital raiser. What are you good at? Maybe it's the visionary and the deal finder, and I'm good at I like talking at brokers and building relationships. Where can I be in that one? And that's it. And let me find partners in others. So, my biggest thing is I guarantee anybody listening to this, you can do it, you can make the leap, but don't feel like you have to do everything because that's what makes you feel overwhelmed. Let's find out what my skill set is and put it out there. That's my skill set. I'm looking for a partner in development. And somebody else out there says, I love development, I don't know how to raise capital. And that's how you start building these partnerships and you can start be building really cool deals after that.
SPEAKER_01Dude, thank you so much for again a great episode here. Just because this isn't probably coming out until November or December, just to time stamp this, I think you're about to become a married man. So I met my wife at a comedy club. I think you met a wife at your hotel. But do you mind 30 seconds on what's happening over the next couple of weeks and who it's with?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I get married in uh 12 days from now. So I'll be gone for two and a half weeks, married in in honeymoon. And uh yeah, my my wife, check her out on Spotify. She is a singer, so she was there playing a show. Her name's Sarah Rowe, soon to be Sarah Weigel, but Sarah Rowe, and she was there playing a show and she hit up for hotel space, and we went and got drinks afterwards. And I do not do that with all my guests, I promise. But it just worked out and we stayed up till 3 a.m. And uh it was absolutely amazing.
SPEAKER_01Man, congratulations. I think on behalf of all unofficially from the BHS, Family Men, congrats, enjoy your time off. Hope to see you again in the future. Again, thanks for all of your advice, your wisdom on our deal, and for helping so many people in the community. That's a pod for today, but yeah, thanks again, Joel. All right, y'all have a good one. All right, that's it for today on the official Book to Hotel Secrets podcast.
SPEAKER_00If this helps, be sure to follow or subscribe and send it to someone who needs that bigger foot. And if you want the community or the resource or the playbook to find what we're learning, the link is just a quick note for BHS community members to turn our own experiences. And if you have questions or topics you want us to cover, reach out and let us help. For building shelves and optimized just like you can have to.