Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang

**Jonathan Wang** (0:00)
When COVID hit, which was a crazy time for hotels, we were running 95% occupancy, and then the state mandated us to send everyone home, and no one knew when they were ever going to reopen or if we were ever going to leave our homes again. There was a hotel at the time. Once Florida lifted the ban on travel, and they capped occupancy at 50%, what we saw at our other assets in the market was that we could fill up to max occupancy at rates that were higher than they were before the world shut down. Basically, the next day, we had this unbelievable data about how demand was going to be for leisure assets that you didn't have to get on a plane for in a mid-COVID environment and potentially post-COVID environment. There was a developer, he built a hotel. We had looked at it years before. We had a great relationship with him. He was in a lot of trouble because he had a full recourse loan. His lender was scared. They didn't want to extend the loan because they were just at zero occupancies.
They called us and said, hey, we need to sell this at this price, which we knew immediately was incredibly attractive. We ended up looking at it, creating a business plan around it, and we were able to buy this hotel. There was some capital improvement as part of this business plan, and there was mainly operational changes and improvement that we could have. The business plan in this case was, we bought a hotel in the marina, we condoned off the marina from the hotel, at the early stages of marina roll-ups starting to form.
We took the brand off the hotel, made it independent. That allowed us to increase revenues through a variety of things and cut costs from paying the brands. The other thing that we did was spend about a million dollars landscaping to give it more separation from the road. We ended up selling the marina to a marina roll-up group, we sold the hotel to a local hotel owner. We enhanced revenues, we were able to cut costs and there was a capital plan associated with it.

**Ted Seides** (2:03)
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators.
My guest on today's show is Jonathan Wang, the founder and CEO of EOS Investors, where he's built three real estate investment platforms totaling $2 billion in assets under management across the hotel and residential sectors. Jonathan also created a wholly owned hotel management company that oversees 60 properties for the EOS funds and five core partners. Our conversation covers Jonathan's path to hotel investing and EOS hotel investment process across market selection, property type, underwriting, vertically integrated operations, and managing through cycles. We also discuss extensions into residential real estate, hotel credit, and opportunities and risks going forward.
Before we get going, summer's in the air, and with that comes summer vacations and out of the office email responses.
At the beginning of the year, I pledged to my team that I'd respond less rapidly to emails while traveling. So I started writing, entertaining, out of the office emails every time I'd be away from my computer. There was one about ditching my cell phone for a day at the masters with no chance I'd respond, just like it ought to be. There was another about not responding because I was attending Will Guidera's Unreasonable Hospitality Summit, which created some cognitive dissonance for me, knowing that I wouldn't respond while allegedly learning how to see others better. And there was yet another about attending Milken, with the recognition that anyone getting the response would probably see me before I responded anyway. Now, many of these out of the offices increased my email count when I got back with a positive response about my reply. That caused me some confusion about whether I should reply to their reply to my reply to their email. One thing I learned from the exercise is we really don't have to reply to email when it comes in. Knowing that others know I won't respond reduces my people-pleasing angst. That's especially true when I get interrupted, like while listening to an episode of Capital Allocators. So if you're listening, ignore your email for a while. And if you do grab your phone to send an email, you may just want to reply that you're engrossed in the latest episode and need some time to thoughtfully reply. Yeah, that works for me. Thanks so much for spreading the word. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies and move faster with leaner teams. With AlphaSense's AI-led expert calls, their Tegas call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. Then they take it one step further. Your call transcripts flow natively into your AlphaSense experience and become searchable and comparable, so your primary insights plug directly into your earnings, diligence and pitch book workflows with no tool switching. AI for coverage and efficiency, humans for complexity and conviction. Sounds like just the right mix to create a scalable institutional edge without growing headcount. For hedge funds, this means validating thesis assumptions before earnings across dozens of experts instead of a handful. For private equity, it means faster pre-IoI scans and deeper commercial diligence. And for asset managers, it means pulling real operators' perspectives straight into models without disconnected tools or manual handoffs. All of this lives inside the AlphaSense platform. Turning raw conversations into comparable, auditable insight. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alphasense.com/capital.