YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Wang

lines on the record: 64
first: 2026-06-15
most recent: 2026-06-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Wife likes to say I'm great at rhyming and have a good way with puns and words. I always thought I was going to be in marketing and write jingles for commercials and come up with slogans. Working in real estate and finance and living in New York and having three kids being an only child myself, life is very different than I thought it would be.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best advice I ever got was from a high school English teacher after I took my job at Goldman. I told her what I was doing. She said, why? And I didn't have any good answers. Finally, I came up with an answer. I said, well, if I don't like it, it won't close any doors. It'll just open doors. She looked disappointed and she said, I will advise you that if you live your life always trying to maximize optionality, you will always be unhappy. What's funny is that in investing so much of what we do is about creating optional and you try to maximize optionality. But when I look at my life, I think about getting married, having an amazing wife, my kids, and even starting this business, my greatest joys come from when I have committed and not focused on maximizing optionality.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes back to my card playing days when I used to play Jin. My parents always said don't bet on an interval when you're making the decision and you feel like there's time constraints or you have to hit this right in a certain period of time. It's when people are making investments that have time pressure, I feel pretty confident that we can have a good view of what's going to happen, how quickly it's going to happen is harder. time pressure and interval investing would be my biggest pet peeve.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said I love basketball. I was so fortunate in high school. I played with two future NBA players and actually played on the fourth-ranked team in the country where we got to play against all sorts of people that played in the NBA over the last decade or two. It was this amazing experience because it was one of these times where not only was it so fun and my big passion, but I learned about teamwork and leading, then also how to take a back seat and the experience of being a part of something great. I still look back on that and I was so lucky and fortunate to be a part of that experience. There's one more I should probably say. It was fun talking about my professional accomplishments, but actually I'm far from the most successful person in my house. My wife is an amazing author, Christina Alger. She's written four best-selling books, and they are phenomenal. If you're going to start with one, I would start with the banker's wife. But what really makes all of this possible is her and her.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growing up in LA, I was a production assistant, otherwise known as a gopher for a TV show called It's A Miracle, which was unsolved mysteries, but like, oh, it's a miracle. It was the positive side. I was a shy kid. And the first day they gave me this list of 200 people that were owed paychecks, residuals, or whatever they were making. I had to cold call these people. And it was good news because I was trying to confirm their address so that they could get their paycheck, but it was mortifying to do. I still think back about that because I did not know how I was going to get that done, but I just did it because I had to after I did the first three or four, it became so much easier. It was a lesson in, wow, something can seem really hard and you do it. There's a quote that I love, which is you're not improving fast enough if you're not somewhat embarrassed by your six month ago self.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always wanted to be a part of something that makes an impact. I'm excited for the relationships that we've built with our investors over the years, with the ways that we're becoming more and more significant in the industries than just being the occasional buyer and seller of assets. We now have almost 7,000 employees at our hotels. We impact a lot of people who take great responsibility for the people that entrust us with their livelihoods. What I hope EOS becomes is a premium provider of whatever we offer, whether it's investment opportunities and equity and residential and hotels, whether it's credit opportunities, whether it's property management. And we do it in a way that is forward thinking and innovative, that generally leaves the areas that we touch and the people that we touch feeling better than before we were there.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Travel. More people came to the US and stayed in hotels than left the US to stay abroad. We have now become a significant exporter of travel. More people leave the US to go abroad than come in. Both components of that are negative. More people are leaving the US to go abroad on vacation and less people are coming to the US for vacation or work. Where is that going to stabilize? Those are two things that are not spoken of that much that we have our eyes on.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I take great comfort because a lot of what I've mentioned. However, two things happened last year that are unique. The question that we're asking ourselves is, hey, are these trends of things to come or are these long-term things? So I started off this by saying since 1987, you've only had hotel demand decrease in years of large global shock. What I left out was that it declined last year. Now, you could say, was Liberation Day global shock? Stock market's up. I don't think so. That broke a 40-year rule. It's up again this year, but I can't say that in absolute terms anymore. That was an absolute pillar of the stability of demand for hotel rooms. It was the same analysis that we looked at when we said Airbnb was not going to do the hotels what Uber did to taxis. We have our eye on that. Another thing that's dramatic is up until 2019, the US was an importer of”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a hotel makes $50 million of revenue, has $40 million of costs. And revenue goes to zero How much money do you lose? No one had ever run the shutdown analysis of a hotel. You just had to deal with it. You had to figure out what a shutdown looked like, what your liquidity looked like and prepare for it. If we all couldn't leave our houses, the hotel business was over. Assuming you get back, actually what these shocks are is just an acceleration of trends.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Domestic travel more resilient than international travel. So we generally are investing in domestic travel because it's more stable. Likewise, one of the big things that's changed post-COVID with the combination of technology is that business travel is down because a lot of people are doing Zoom meetings. That wasn't something that just happened overnight. The adoption was accelerated because we were all forced to do it so quickly. And it's held. If you look at how business travel was trending for years before that, you could start to see those trends happening. If we're not repeating and doing what's worked before and saying, oh, well, that feels good. And we're constantly evaluating what's changed, what could change, that's what's preparing for it. Now look, COVID for the hotel business was a very scary time. I remember going for a walk and saying, okay.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The preparation comes in what we're buying and how we're trying to isolate for as much as possible and to create an asymmetric skew to the upside. COVID was totally unexpected. Yet we found ourselves 90% allocated into a drive-to-leisure thesis, which was the small subsector of hospitality that took off like a rocket right in the middle of COVID. I generally believe that the shocks that we've seen have been short-term shocks that accelerate trends that we've seen coming for a long time. What the long-term trends that we've seen are international travel has generally become harder over the last 20 years, whether it's visa issues or cost of flights, all sorts of stuff have made the”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As many other things over a couple decades, he retired from Wells in 22. We had created a great relationship over fifteen years of working together. He was in New York, our office saying I might try to do some getting a lot of calls about this interesting space. I said, look, I don't think the things you're thinking about are interesting. I don't know if we can stand this up, but if you wanted to, the combination of our ownership evaluation and operational capabilities, along with your credit experience and network, This is a huge opportunity. So we decided about a year ago to launch this platform. We closed on our first fund a little while ago. We are so excited about the credit opportunity that exists. It's long-term opportunity set mixed with generational talent that also is additive to our overall business is what led us.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“broadened us from a hotel investment firm to a real estate investment firm, which was a bit of an identity change, leaning into a core competency felt much easier. The interesting thing was most real estate investors would look back and when interest rates rose in the middle of 22, you could look at your credit returns and you could say, wow, credit's more interesting than equity. We saw that. We saw that close to four years ago. We also made the decision that we couldn't be transient players in this space. So we decided to sit it out. years and years passed we kept seeing it. Our lenders were showing up in different ways. We saw the holes that existed and we kept thinking it was really interesting. We saw this huge opportunity set for years. What was the catalyst to doing it was this guy Christopher Jordan who was the most prolific hotel lender over the last couple decades. He ran and built Wells Fargo's hotel hospitality lending unit as well.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the hardest things to do because it's easy to say, hey, that worked. Let's just rinse, repeat, and do it again. It's harder to say, hey, we made our money here. This now doesn't feel as good as this other thing. And how are you doing it? That is what stood out was how well she could articulate how she pivoted across subsectors over close to a 15-year period where if she made any mistakes, it was getting out of things too early.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I met her, I thought she was a great investor. I had this gut instinct to it. I went and I spoke to one of our investors about it and said, think about starting this residential investment strategy. I said, her track record's extraordinary. And they said, you got to be really careful because everyone's track record in residential is extraordinary for the last decade. I said, ah, that's a good point. If you dissect the track record and figure out how Nicole's track record was created, what was so interesting about it was She didn't just invest in multifamily and ride the cycle for 10 years. She was pivoting in and out of these subsectors, in many cases far too early because the risk reward became more interesting in other places. That logic about thematic investing, about risk reward, where the best risk return is between this and the pivot to me.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was buying San Francisco hotels at deep discounts to 2019 levels. But when you looked at the broader cross-section of what we could do just in residential senior housing was screaming as what we should do, it made us better investors to see what you could be investing in in a broader set.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have a unique talent that we can attract to partner with to really run that business, who we think is at the top of the game. Third, we should never do it unless we think we can be the best or close to the best. Fourth, we won't do it unless it makes our other businesses better. How did the residential business make our other businesses better? When you're a specialist, what I fought every day was being too myopic. Don't make a good hotel investment because it's the best hotel investment you can make. Make a good hotel investment because it's a great investment. It became a whole lot easier the minute we could see the actionable opportunities in this other sector. As a firm, the most interesting opportunities that we've seen for the last two and a half years have largely been in the residential sector and senior housing where Nicole was early and we were big buyers of that over the last two years. On the hotel side, the very small opportunity set that we saw.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More important to have a broad mandate and to be able to trade in and out of those things. What we've leaned into here is creating a scaled specialist firm is deep expertise and outperformance at the specific property level where deep expertise is going to lead to outperformance with the benefits of a larger halo on top to supercharge those investment platforms. We will never set up a platform that doesn't do four things. One is an opportunity set that we think has decades of”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I met Nicole. What was interesting is that the edge in the hotel side is largely driven by our vertical integration. The way Nicole invests is not a vertically integrated platform, but by having a broad mandate to trade in and out of residential subsectors as the risk reward becomes more interesting in those different areas. It was a gut check moment of, well, what is EOS? Is it a vertically integrated real estate investment? What I realized was To the extent we're ever going to grow this business and we're going to set up different investment platforms. What we have to do is set up the investment platforms in a way that maximize their performance for our investors over the next 20 years. In some ways, one platform might be vertically integrated and another one might not be because it set up an operational day-to-day oversight is less important and it's”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had to ask myself that during that process, the trends that we were seeing out there, broadly speaking, were the large investment managers get bigger. We were seeing it getting harder for people to launch small investment businesses. We were seeing a fair amount of frustration mounting from people that worked at some of these large asset managers as the business models were changing. We started getting calls from people outside of hotels that said, hey, could we ever start something together? You did it. I don't want to do it on my own, but could we do something together? So we spoke with our initial investors and said, hey, would you ever back us in a non-hotel strategy? And because we had earned so much trust surviving late cycle and COVID, they said, well, yeah, we have a lot of trust. If it's the right person and strategy, we back you in doing this. I went out and tried to meet as many people as I could in my network outside of my network that we could potentially do something with.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is to try to see what the opportunity in the landscape is out there and to figure out how the business evolves over time to capture that responding in some part to how the world and the industry around us is evolving and based off of the opportunities that we're seeing that we can capture.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We now own a lot more hotels than I ever thought we would. Our hotel manager grew pretty tremendously. So that's now a really impressive entity that is a lot of fun and gives us a huge advantage. Also, about three years ago, we capitalized on some trends that we were seeing in the asset management space and we started a separate residential business with a partner of mine, this woman, Nicole Sermier, who's a fabulous investor. That business is different than our hotel business, but has made our company so much better. Just a few months ago, we launched a hotel credit business to fill a very needed hole that's been created from the way regulations that banks have continued to form and also the way private credit in real estate has formed. What has been really fun to be able to do, and I'm grateful that we have great existing investors and partners.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The business has changed a lot. When I started it, what I knew was we were starting a hotel investment firm late cycle. And people said, you're crazy. I said, no, you can't pick your time. You can just figure out your pace of deployment. You didn't raise a lot of capital, so it wasn't daunting. I knew we had enough to get through to another good time. The thing that has been the most fun is that being an entrepreneur, you are always trying to figure out what you should be doing or could be doing to capture opportunity if you set up a business, how is that business set up? What's its edge and what does it deserve to be able to do? I thought we set up this business we were going to be a small hotel owner. We were going to set up a stub hotel property manager to manage our own assets. We done five to ten hotels at the time, and that would be a great little business. Well, the world changed. The opportunity for us changed.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You put on your entrepreneurial hat of having built this business, what are the most important things you've learned from running an asset management business that are different from what you thought when you started EOS?”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is exciting? Is it banks are starting to make people deal with problems or sellers are now capitulating a bit? There's going to be a much more active investment environment over the next couple years.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm really excited. There is so much noise out there. I have never in my career seen assets and markets and types of travel perform in a less coordinated way. There is going to be incredible opportunity here as people make decisions about disposing of assets where there'll be a lot of people that can't figure out what markets they should be investing in. That's going to create great opportunity. For so long, a good market grew at 6% a year and a bad market grew at 2% a year. Now you have markets that are going in totally different directions and submarkets within those markets that are going in totally different directions. So it's never been harder to comp to the like sale. You can't really just comp to the like sale. So I think there's going to be great buying opportunities. But we're finally starting to see.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the Delaware beaches and Hilton Head, all markets where we're one of the largest owners of properties. How can we make that determination quicker than stumbling on it seven years after first buying our Hotel Nick”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be vastly improved because we're going to be able to look and see what markets look similar to these seven large resorts that we're seeing. I think it's going to broaden our ability to invest. But I'm also hopeful for is that we'll be able to see if we've made mistakes, where have we made the mistakes in the past going into COVID, or at least now we are one of the largest owners of regional resorts drive to resorts in the country. For a long time, we thought that that segment of the market really was just Florida and California. It wasn't until 2019 when we bought a big, great property in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that we realized that the same dynamics exist in other coastal markets that are within three hour drive-to distances. And so once we saw Myrtle, we said, hey, where else is this true? And that led us to Cape Cod and Kenny Bunkport, Maine.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to say we're doing a lot with it right now, but we're talking about it. We're close to hopefully doing something with it now that we've been doing this for a long time and we have a lot of data, both in terms of properties when we look to buy them in our files as well as data coming in every single day in terms of booking trends. We are really focused on figuring out how to identify trends quicker seeing what more holistically we can do to isolate what's actually meaningful. When I think about the framework that we created.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Planning of a renovations, our business plans for the assets, trying to figure out a story and a through line and what we're trying to create. And that's very different. When we own a five-star hotel in Cape Cod and we're renovating it and it wants to be really quintessential New England beach resort, it's very different than when we're buying a hotel out of bankruptcy in Beverly Hills and it's got to be five-star luxury for the highest end consumers in the country. making sure that we're assembling the right teams is critical to the success of the hotel. We want our returns to be based on us doing a professional job and we want outsized performance for doing an exceptional job because even as much thought as you give to some of this, that's a much harder thing that shouldn't be baked into your base case.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hotels are a very people orient to business. A lot of what you create has to resonate with the guests that you have. That is one of the harder things to do. I go back to being a real estate investor that invests in hotels. Generally, we never want to make the core business plan or returns that we're banking on dependent on us doing an exceptional job with design or food and beverage outcomes or outperforming the market. We always want to do that, but we want that to be our upside, where that's really important is that if you do a fabulous job, you should make a great return. If you do a good job, you should make your base case. We spend a tremendous amount of time and effort in”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're always working equally hard. It's just a question of how productive we are or not. It's more stressful when we're not finding good investments because you wonder what you're missing, what you can find, what you could be thinking outside the box, how you could be doing it. And it drives you crazy. It's much easier to be doing more because you're feeling productive. You're feeling good about what you're doing. You're making progress and you're growing. We have between our acquisitions team, our asset management team, and the operations team, we are now fully scaled to where we're never at short of resources to be able to execute on investments. We are looking forward to a time when the investment environment becomes more fruitful. The workload has stayed constant. It's just how much fun we're having.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started to join the firm. Others in the industry took notice and wanted to work with us. So the business has grown both on the operating side and on the investment side to now where we're one of the larger owners of hotels in the country, also one of the larger managers of hotels in the country. Going back to the investment framework, I think in six of the nine years that we've been around, we've made one or zero investments. When we have deep conviction, we move fast and will invest pretty heavily. But over that nine-year period, more times than not, it has not been a great investment environment.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never thought that we would be as big as we are today. We own 45 hotels, mainly resort, and then I'd call it higher-end urban assets. We have an operating platform that now manages about 60 assets. So they manage R45 and then very selectively for other sophisticated owners in the business will manage for. When I started the business, I thought we would be small hotel investment firm. We'd buy a couple assets. We'd add value. We'd sell them. Probably never get to be more than 10. When COVID happened and we were so directionally invested in these drive-to resort assets, the industry was on its back and we were doing quite well because we had this unique pipeline to execute on, the business scaled quickly in a way that wasn't anticipated. The real magic of that moment was that unbelievable talent.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roll ups during the forum. 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 we spent about a million dollars landscaping to give it more separation from the road. We ended up selling the marina to a marina rollup group. We sold the hotel to a local hotel owner. I always liked that example because it wouldn't have come to us unless we built a long relationship. We wouldn't have been comfortable to do it if we didn't have such familiarity with a market. We enhanced revenues. We were able to cut costs and there was a capital plan associated with it. That is when things come together. It's a good example of all the areas in which we can create value.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 condoed off the marina from the hotel at the early stages of marina.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of what we do in terms of sourcing assets and markets sometimes starts 10 years before we make an acquisition. We have been the most active investor in the Florida Keys since 2011. I think I've bought and sold now 17 hotels in the Florida Keys. When COVID hit, which was a crazy time for hotels, we were running 95% occupancy and then the state mandated us to shut, 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's 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”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The worst performing hotel market in the United States from 2007 to 2019 was New York City. That's largely because of the way supply came into that market over that decade. Within that framework, that's where we invest. We typically avoid markets with a lot of supply where we've seen people make money that we miss is the markets where there is a lot of supply and demand seems to keep pace. Eventually, we think the music stops and the supply stays so you can get caught. But markets like Austin, markets like Nashville have been great performers for people over a large period of the last 15 years. If we're not early into those markets, we let that opportunity pass.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we have found over a long period of time is that 90% of what we were going to invest in is in seven large urban markets. So Boston, New York, D.C., Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, LA, and resorts, which the vast majority of the resorts that we invest in are up and down the east and west coast. We've actually never invested in Hawaii, although we always look at Hawaii. The reason that is, is that At most points in time, some of those markets are interesting in the framework that I mentioned. There are times where some of those markets are really interesting, and sometimes those markets are not interesting, and they come in and out of favor largely based off of what we're seeing from a supply-demand dynamic. If you go back the most interesting and best performing hotel market in the world from 1987 to 2007 was New York City.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asset because we're figuring out what we think an existing asset can do, and we're figuring out whether return is on any capital that we spend or any initiatives that we want to take to rent. We will generally act quickly. So we will try to have our entire plan obviously figured out before we commit to doing an investment, but we're working to implement those changes on the day that we take over an asset.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two main buckets that we would put a business plan into. One would be physical renovation if we're transforming an asset. That could be from redoing a lobby, changing the appeal of it, redoing the rooms, adding real amenities. Some of those renovations can be anywhere from $5 million to $70 million. You can have a totally different impact, create real revenue enhancing cases, or just redo what's existing there. The other side of it is what we would call operational business plans, so management related. And that can either be strategies around improving revenues or strategies around decreasing costs. In some cases, you could increase costs if you want to increase revenues because you offer more services, but it falls into operational or capital buckets. That is what we spend a tremendous amount of time on when we are buying.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions because if you think about an acquisition person incentive, it's to get something done. If you think about the operations team, they feel pressure to hit the pro forma that the acquisitions person puts together. If you don't have full alignment between those teams and accountability across the board as one team, you end up with a situation where you've got misalignment of objectives where an investment team says they feel good about something they hand it to the team that has to execute. They say that's too aggressive. And then you end up in a bad spot. From the time that we start to get serious about something, we bring in our operations team to be involved with the underwriting. When we decide to make a decision, it's a holistic decision across every one of those contributors.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seen this all different ways throughout my career. The real unlocking of vertical integration comes when the operations team and the investment teams work as one, recognizing that they both feel different pressures and risks. Our investments team and our operating team are partners throughout the whole investment. Before we're buying something, our acquisitions team is the majority partner. After we buy it, our acquisitions team is the minority partner. What that requires is transparency between everybody that's making those decisions about what are the things that we need to go right for this investment to be good and what are the things that could happen for us that would make it great. How many of those do we need to hit and what's our confidence factor across each of those? Everybody needs to be in the room for those.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let them do their thing. There have been great teams where we've said, hey, they're great at this, but we can supplement with these other areas. And there's been assets where we have to make management changes to take the asset to where we want it to be. It's much less about the existing team and much more about the team that will be there when we own it. Anytime you're taking an existing team and changing it, there's more risk. So that would be more of a turnaround or a transformation of a property and you'd factor that into the price and the returns that you're going to hopefully get.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I do love about this industry is it's full of great people. You've got the people you're talking about in terms of existing management teams are the manager's assets, which are not investors, but they are hospitality professionals. The strength of hospitality professionals is quite diverse. You could have a great business person running a hotel who understands ROI and trade-offs and you could have a great guest ambassador who attracts the most loyal guest that will pay more because he or she's been there for 20 years. The quality of the team prior to our buying the asset is not as important as the quality of the team that would be in there when we're owning the asset. We've bought hotels where there's been terrific teams that we hope we can help supercharge.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason for that would be because we live in such a volatile world. What we're trying to do is anticipate the future. You can't predict everything. We want to make sure we have a margin of safety from how we're financing ourselves so that if there are short-term shocks, we can ride through that without being forced to do something that we wouldn't want to do. We have great conviction in a five to 10 year outlook and how we're investing. We do have to take into consideration the fact that there are no future revenue commitments. So if there's short-term volatility, we want to be prepared for that.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can be in the resort side. They can be assets that people seek out that have no real competition. Your closest competitor is just very different non-commodity would be an ocean front resort. In some cases, it could be the room type or if it's standalone villas, city center locations generally have a much higher business percentage that would stay at those hotels, but what is their leisure mix? Are people choosing to stay there in the off business time? Are their weekends stronger than their weekdays or are they outperform their competition during that time? You can have a variety of factors why people will pay more, location, physical layout, amenity base. What are the reasons why people will choose to spend an extra $10 to stay here as opposed to somewhere down the street?”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out how we can expand what we're doing. If you really stick to those three dynamics, it's been a pretty defensive way to invest over the last 20 years with a lot of asymmetry to the upside.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have four core pillars of how we're investing. We like to say interesting supply demand dynamics over the short to medium term. We want to buy non-commoditized assets, assets that people will pay more to stay at, not just shop you for the cheapest rate on whatever channel they can do that. Third, we always like to have diversified demand drivers. There's really three forms of business that stay at hotels and how they're segmented. One is group business, conferences, meetings, weddings, anything that's over 10 room nights. The second is business transient. And the third is leisure. We never want to put too much leverage on assets where we're forced to make bad asset decisions because of financial pressure. On the first three pillars, while we always look to”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underwrite less market growth. We're definitely not the only one. I'm sure there's other people that do things that we don't. But I think that that's the methodology that we've used over the years that has generally kept us out of trouble. It's really thinking about the asset class as a real estate asset that is based off of the core fundamentals of supply and demand and pricing power, not putting as much emphasis on, oh, we can do anything because if we'd make it special, we can charge what we want.”
2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source