Bill Blackham, President and CEO of Condor Hospitality Trust, speaks to Bob Braun, senior member of JMBM’s Global Hospitality Group® at JMBM’s 2016 Meet the Money® – the national hotel finance and investment conference. They discuss Condor’s transition from economy chain scale into select service, extended stay and limited service hotels, RevPAR, and opportunities in the select service sector.
A transcript follows the video. See other videos in this series on the Jeffer Mangels YouTube channel.
Bob Braun: I’m with Bill Blackham of Condor Hospitality Trust. Bill, thanks very much for taking out the time to talk to us today. What are you currently working on? What’s Condor focused on these days?
Bill Blackham: Condor has been involved over the last year in a lot of different initiatives that involve the transition of the company from once being an economy chain scale-focused entity into a select service, extended stay and limited service hotel company, with a platform that is growing in that new investment strategy at the same time that we are divesting the old investment strategy hotels. Therefore, you have multiple things going on at the same time. Combined with a recent private placement of equity into the company with a new investor, it’s been a very busy time.
Bob Braun: So, what drove this shift from the economy (sector), up the ladder a little bit to the limited and select service?
Bill Blackham: I think that the potential for stock growth was far greater in the space that we’re now pursuing. One of the problems with the sector that the company had previously been in is that the average size hotel was very small. And in order to get to a very meaningful scale to justify being a public company, one would have to own four-, five-, six-hundred of those hotels, which is unwieldy from the standpoint of managing that platform.
I think that the platform that we’re going into also affords us the opportunity to have greater investor interest because it is a sector that continues to have above-industry growth in terms of demand, while at the same time is a space that has much higher margins than we are, as a company, traditionally in. So the higher margins combined with sort of a void in the space, the public company space of people that we’re going specifically after, the geographic markets that we’re pursuing, and the type of products that we’re pursuing really left an opportunity open to get highly accretive acquisitions.
Bob Braun: So this is an open space for you. Do you see yourself moving further? Do you see yourself ever developing into the full service area? CONTINUE READING →