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Jonathan Wang

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64
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2026-06-15
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2026-06-15
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  1. “Assume that everybody has created their own frameworks for analysis. I'd like to say that I'm really a real estate investor that has focused on hospitality. There is a difference between that and somebody who is a hotel investor. What I mean by that is if I had to bifurcate the market underwriting from the idiosyncratic asset underwriting, I would give a 75% weight to getting the market right, if not higher and doing all of the work on the individual asset is critically important too if you get the market wrong, getting the asset rights not going to make up for it. A lot of people in the space might not give that much of a weight to market and are more focused on the idiosyncratic business plan and take great comfort from being able to”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “They're not cheap enough. That's the really interesting thing that comes about the industry and the markets. We're always checking what we're doing and trying to see what's coming next or what's going to change this. What gives me great comfort is that over almost 25 years of investing in hotels through some pretty dramatic changes, including COVID, these trend lines continue to hold constant even through everything. At the tailwind, I'd say you have some great things happening demographically where the younger generations want to spend more money on experiences and travel than they do on material goods, even in this world where who knows exactly what the impacts of AI are going to be on everything. There's a school of thought that as AI continues to make things more automated, people are going to want more human interaction. And so travel has a lot of tailwinds to it, even based off of where we're coming from.”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Which would be interesting about these charts when we put them together, every market and submarket actually behaves differently. It's a different level for every single market. That has to do with seasonality. It has to do with how much supply exists in a market. What's really interesting is that almost every one of these markets has a demarcating line or if you do a scatter plot for the last 40 years where above and below a certain threshold, there is a pronounced difference of ability to drive rate. It's not even close. It's below 72% occupancy. You have no pricing power and above 72% occupancy you might be able to push rate on average 5%. We oftentimes will find ourselves in a situation where people will say, oh gosh, why are you buying in this market? You have to believe a lot of growth. You look at it and you say, yeah, because there's going to be a lot more coming. We'll also find ourselves in a position where people say, wait, why aren't you buying hotels here? They're so cheap. We say, we say, we say, we say, well,”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Compression charts, which was to figure out at what point of occupancy do you start to have pricing power? If you look at those charts, there's a lot of correlation and pricing power related to exactly what your occupancies are. So you could go back, look, and create what you would view as a pretty reliable scientific methodology to project revenues when there was no certainty over medium periods of time. So you would always want to invest in areas where you could believe historical averages when you thought you were going to far exceed that. People have said that I might be a contrarian investor in hotels. I don't think we're contrarian at all. We're highly focused on figuring out what the data says and where it's. What market should we be investing in, which might be before others find it?”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Those, the pillar of our analysis was predicated on a real misconception that people think hotels are super volatile. Actually, if you go back all the way to 1987, which is as far back as you have dated, you can see that demand for hotel rooms across the US has grown at just about 2% a year for 40 years and only ever declined in periods of global shock. So 91 with the Gulf War 01 with the tech crash, GFC in 089 in 2020 with COVID. But that trend line is very stable. If you take a little bit more of a medium-term view, there's a lot of stability when people pricing a lot of volatility. Then what you could figure out is that nice thing about real estate is you have good visibility into the supply pipeline out a couple years. If you have demand and you have supply, you can figure out occupancy. And we made these charts that we used to call”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Things go well. So we said, Is there a better way to do this? Well, what if we're both sides of it? What if we're the operator and we're the owner and we create this vertical integration? That seemed like a good idea. The problem was at 27 having no experience doing it. It was like, how do you now figure out if there's a good investment? I went back to say, okay, well, what data do we have available? How are we going to figure this out? And we created this framework that I still use to this day, although we continually tweak it and update it, which was quite basic and simple, but tries to make hotel underwriting scientific. It's tough to be scientific when you have daily leases and no longer commitments. But what we realized was the data that was available to us was robust. If you looked at it over long periods of time, you could make some pretty interesting conclusions that I don't think is the way most people invest in hotels. What were some of them?”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Way institutions invested in real estate, going back to what I would say is the birth of real estate private equity coming out of the RTC, for the most part was large investors partnered with operators to go buy real estate. Operators would bring the investments to large investors, they would figure out if they liked the risk reward, try to figure out a deal between the two of them, and then buy an asset. When I was at Goldman, that's how that business model generally worked. When instead of this new job, because we were doing this from scratch, we got to think about the model holistically and we said, hey, this is a bad setup for investors because we're reliant on operators to bring us the investment, we're not controlling our funnel of sourcing. Then we're giving upside.”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I realized early on that I was curious about everything. I never wanted to be too focused on any one thing. I describe hotels as my window into the world. We have to think about everything that's going on, whether it's international relations or demographic preferences or the price of gas or the way populations are moving within cities or how travel segmenting or how technology is becoming an intermediary to the booking process. We get to think about everything as a part of it. The nice thing about it tells us that you can relate to everybody about them. Everyone stays at hotels. Everyone has preferences. Everyone has opinions. It's a way to think about the world holistically, which I've always loved trying to do.”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “This great experience for about 10 years learning about building a firm, not having the responsibility of building that firm, but seeing it from day one. As the team was getting built out there, I had the opportunity to figure out what I wanted to focus on. And because I had experience with hotels and he had bought a lot of hotels at Blackstone, I decided to focus on building and overseeing our hotel investment business, which became one of the largest in the industry. I love hotels. That's how I got started. I was there for about 10 years and I had the opportunity to take the next level of entrepreneurship and start my own firm when I had a couple of folks that I knew from my time at Goldman that were interested in backing me. The timing felt right. I started Eocin 2017. So we're coming up on 10 years now.”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You'd have a great experience. At that age, I had a sense that mentorship was always important, not just what you're learning, but people focusing on investing in you. So I took the job in real estate, did corporate advisory work at Goldman for two years, realized I liked real estate, but liked the investing side more than the advisory side. I was fortunate to get a job to transfer after two years internally into the internal real estate private equity group, which was called the Whitehall Group, which is one of the largest in the world at the time, did that for about two and a half years, realized I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial. Talked to a few people. I had this unique opportunity to go be the second employee at a startup real estate firm. It was started by one of the early founders of Blackstone's real estate group, not knowing what risk was at 27, took that job, had”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “One for investment banking into the TMT group, so the technology media group, and the other into real estate. I didn't know much about either, but the guy that was recruiting me into the real estate group said, I really want you to work here. I work on all of our hotels and gaming companies. We'll play basketball on the weekends.”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Grew up in Los Angeles, only child. I describe myself as a late bloomer. I was a shy kid on the weekend. I used to spend time at home with my parents, play cards, mainly gin and hearts, which I am now trying to impart on my kids today. I loved basketball, which was my focus for most of my upbringing, more than school or anything else. I was entering my senior year of high school, which was an important year for recruiting. And I got injured, which was tough at the time. But in hindsight, it was probably one of the most pivotal moments in my life because I started focusing on academics more. My friend circles changed a bit. Even the music I started listening to changed, I ended up going to University of Michigan, transferring into the business school after that. Fortunate to get a job doing investment banking at Goldman Sachs after college, came back to basketball again. I got two job offers out of school. It was both at Goldman.”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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. It was at the early stages of marina roll-ups in 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 spent 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”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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 shutdown, 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.”

    2026-06-15 · Capital Allocators · Hotel Investing at EOS – Jonathan Wang (EP.506) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source