The Beechmont Beerware Hotel Development Index

This is something new that we got our guys started on, and got to thinking, we could work it into something useful that we could charge for. It's still a work in progress, so we use a 'beerware' pricing model (only charging real money for custom work)

Over time, we'll refine it. We're also going to add marketing data such as traffic and demand generators.

Thank you for your support.

Click here for the index.

How do you know a hotel will do well in a given location?

I've seen hotels built for the most respectable reasons, after carefully researching a market, the planned location of the hotel, and that area's needs, and what sort of hotel would best answer those needs. I've seen them built for reasons as not-so-respectable as the fact that the owner owned the site and wanted to put a hotel on it (never mind it would be the worst part of town in which to locate a hotel, or that town had less-than-zero need or demand for new hotels at all), or someone had friends, family or a girlfriend living in a certain town; or someone had a relative who needed a job and the owner figured, how hard can running a hotel be? People who can access the resources to build a hotel can put one wherever they can secure a building site, and many do so, shall we say, quite freely.

Here is how I go about it.

We look at the specific location within a town that we have in mind. Just being in one part of town or another can make quite a difference even in a smaller city. So, you want to sort out your existing hotels in a city by the individual submarkets within that city in which they are located.

HVS divides most larger cities into recognized submarkets, but you can identify them yourself (adequately, if not altogether accurately by HVS's methodology) by bringing up a city in which you're considering a new hotel on Google Maps, searching 'hotels', and noticing in what areas of town that the little red symbols that represent the hotels that come up seem to be clustered on that map. A few isolated properties will occur, but each of these clusters indicates the presence of a separate submarket.

Why is tourism in Antarctica so expensive? Why don't they expand the tourist industry and decrease the prices?

Find me enough people who want to travel there and spend a few days to keep a 60-to-80 room hotel about 60 to 80% full on a daily basis at $1000–1500 per night (there'd be a lot of logistical factors to think about including snow removal, heat and electricity; none of which will be as attainable or as easy as it would be in a less desolate place with at least some infrastructure; before we even go there about vastly increased construction costs, so I'm not confident we could get the rates down even that low. . .); and perhaps we'll give a little more thought to putting a hotel there.

Until then, we're not making any big plans to go there for the same reason we don't want to build a hotel in Hell, or in some ISIS-controlled area of Syria, or in some small warlord-controlled town in Somalia or drug cartel-controlled village in Honduras, or in the middle of the Sahara Desert . . . because nobody wants to go there and there's no market for it.

Accordingly, anyone who does have a reason to go down there and spend a few days has to be able to bear the entire cost of what is required for them to stay (or survive) there . . .

Originally appeared on Quora

Hotels for sale: Red Lion Inn and Suites, Fayetteville NC

Property offering:

Listing broker: Paramount Lodging Advisors, via Ten-X

Red Lion Inn and Suites, Fayetteville – Paramount Lodging page
Red Lion Inn and Suites, Fayetteville – Ten-X page

This property is an early generation Hampton Inn exterior corridor prototype. Wherever you find one of these, the box is usually pretty well-built.

Space in the double rooms can be a little tight: these rooms are double queens but were originally designed to accommodate only double-doubles: when I stay in Chapel Hill overnight, I stay at the Quality Inn there and have more than once stubbed a toe walking around in the middle of the night.

This Fayetteville property isn’t laid out in the U-shape featured in Chapel Hill (or the L-shape featured in Greenville, N. C.), but usually, extra care was taken when these properties were built to have them look sharp, be appropriately landscaped, and not show up as a cheap exterior corridor ‘motel’.

Property website and TripAdvisor reviews

TripAdvisor bubble score: 3.5.

Red Lion Inn and Suites, Fayetteville – Red Lion child site

Financial data available

Limited. Paramount may update their due diligence material on Ten-X, but it appears as though they uploaded the wrong P&L. The one that’s there is for a Holiday Inn in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The screwup turned out to be an opportunity of sorts. It forced us to rely upon figures from the STR report, and you can get a STR report from any number of places; so we convey no information in this assessment that is subject to a confidentiality agreement, and can share it around a bit more freely.

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Hotel Management: What is a healthy ratio of food & beverage revenue to room revenue?

Zero to irrelevant. (I'm not being a wise guy. I'm serious.)

• If you have a limited service or select service operation with a breakfast, manager's reception, or snacks and sodas provided to attendees of your events in whatever meeting or small conference space you have; then you have no f&b revenue or, if you do (say, the eight to ten bucks you can be asked to pay for a cooked-to-order breakfast at a Hilton Garden Inn), food is only incidental to your main business of renting the rooms, or renting the conference facility. The $8-10 you charge for breakfast at a Hyatt Place (another one of those new, 'upscale select service' brands that, along with Hilton Garden Inn, are a growing segment of the business . . .) will take the edge off the cost of providing it, but will not amount to a significant revenue source by comparison to your room charges - if it even completely covers the cost of providing the food.