Selling a business is no walk in the park – it’s a complex and time-consuming undertaking. While the sale of every business is unique, the fundamentals are the same, and there are well-established steps you can take to find the right deal, not just for selling but for buying as well. The more prepared you are, the more likely you are to maximize profits. 

You might not be selling today, but when is the right time to start preparing? 

The answer is, now!

To walk us through this process, on the bench this week, we have Tom Gibson, a director of CBRE Hotels Asia Pacific. Tom Gibson is accomplished, forward-thinking, and visionary with strong business acumen who has taken the complicated process of selling hotels and simplified it into easier actionable steps for the different stages you will take when selling your business.

In this interview, we talk about how you can build your business to sell, why some hotels are valued more than others, what you can do as an entrepreneur to maximize the value of your business, how to value a business, and locating and negotiating with the right buyers. Tom gives us a comprehensive insight into how to sell a business and achieve the optimal return on your investment. 

Tom Gibson is a Director for CBRE Hotels Capital Markets with over 15 years of hotel advisory and hospitality experience, covering major markets in the Asia Pacific, North America, and Central America.
Prior to moving back to Australia in 2016, Tom worked in the United States with JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group based in Miami, as well as the company’s headquarters in Chicago.

Now based in Sydney, Tom covers the investment sales and strategic advisory of major single asset and portfolios throughout Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific and has been directly involved in over $4.0 billion worth of transactions.

Your business may be your most valuable asset, and building a successful business can take years of time and effort. If you’re considering selling your business down the road, this episode can help you make an informed decision – and maximize the price you receive for the sale.

Topics we cover in this week’s episode:

– What you can do to ensure the highest possible offer?
– What the guidelines are for pricing your property?
– How and where to do your research.
– Where and how to find prospective buyers to buy your property.
– How to prepare your business for sale from day one.

📣   Listen to the episode here
👓   Watch the episode here

Transcription:

Welcome back to The Accommodation Show, we help accommodation owners like you get the knowledge and skill that you need to grow your business, improve your guest’s experience and increase your profitability. 

Okay everybody welcome back to the comedy show. Today I am super excited to be talking about how to sell a hotel and I am joined by Tom Gibson from CBRE hotels. Welcome to the show.

Gibson: Thank you, Bart. Good to be on.

Bart: Yeah, I’m really excited because I like this topic. I like that. You’re joining us, you’ve got a huge amount of experience in the hotel space in managing assets selling assets, and that sort of thing. I really love to know more about you about what we’re gonna be talking about today and where you fit into the whole puzzle of hotels.

Gibson: Thank you. Yes. So I work with CBRE hotels hotel investment sales team we have quite a large team and the biggest in the region through the Asia Pacific. We specialize in hotels and resorts. We have multiple aspects of advisory that we provide to that from investment sales, which is the team that I’m on to evaluations, research, and then further debt advisory project management. The list goes on. It really really depends on the type of client and I guess the motive for the assignment is that we bring in different elements of our business to help the client. Personally, I’ve started off in residential real estate about 15 years ago and I was fortunate to sell this actually CBRE director’s house in Brisbane, he brought me on to his team and we started working together which was a lot of fun and that exposed me to the host hotel sector.

Have a bit of hotel blood in me from my father and my grandfather and with a bit of time in covering the Queensland market then eventually grow out to move overseas. I did a bit of time in Miami, Florida with Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels and covered South Florida and the Caribbean markets. And then later after that Chicago, Illinois with the Midwest and then eventually back to Australia where you are now cover the Asia Pacific on investment.

Bart: Amazing so I mean your history and the length of time that you’ve been in the industry has been huge and I just love the story that you’ve been sort of all over the world and seeing all different aspects of hotels and I imagine it is super varied.

Gibson: Yeah, it is. The hospitality hotel market is very diverse. No matter which part of the world you kind of traveled to and experienced and I was fortunate enough to enjoy some time overseas and travel all over America and Latin America and South America with the jazz Lang LaSalle team over there and got exposed to some pretty interesting assets and clients and you know, bringing that skill set back into the Asia Pacific and kind of, you know, taking advantage of what we have to offer here as a platform at CBRE and, and really, you know, over-servicing our clients in the region so it’s been an amazing ride.

Bart: Yeah, there’s kind of two aspects I want to cover one is you know the change of landscape and selling the hotel and I think that’s really why we’re gonna be talking about today. So I think there are two elements is that we’ll talk about how to sell a hotel, which is super interesting, but there’s also the changing landscape, but just before I do, I’m really curious, like, when you talk about the APAC region, what does that mean? to you guys? Because I find it’s quite varied depending on different companies and what it actually means because AIPAC is just so massive. What does it mean to you and CBT CBRE?

Gibson: Yeah, so currently I APAC region. We cover investment sales of hotels in Japan, in French Polynesia, Australia, and New Zealand. So I guess when you look at the number of brokers and advisors, there isn’t the hotel space in, the whole of this market. There are not a lot and specific advisors. It’s even a lesser amount. So when we cover AIPAC, it’s kind of in our best interest to be diversified in our skill set and offer. There are only so many hotel owners in the region and there is not a lot of them. So they might typically have a hotel in Sydney and maybe one in Japan and maybe one in Singapore. So we do cover that on the whole I guess as a team.

Bart: And so did that Cover Indonesia as well? Yeah, definitely.

Gibson: All through Southeast Asia. So really up as far as Japan out to Hawaii, French Polynesia, all the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, Australia, obviously and then China, Hong Kong, and then all through Southeast Asia.

Bart: Okay, cool. So now things start moving into sort of today’s topic, which is how to sell a hotel. Let’s, let’s kind of break it down. What are we talking about when we’re selling a hotel.

Gibson: So when you look at the hotel ownership landscape of how we are engaged as a broker as an advisor, why would someone call us and in selling their hotels, there’s really two buckets or two primary buckets with a third off-site which I’ll touch on later. But the two first ones, I own a physical hotel where you can touch it, feel it, you can stay the night there, and I want to divest, I want to sell it so just like with a residential house, you engage an agent to sell the real estate on your behalf you would call us and we would run a process to find money to be able to acquire the hotel. 

The other main bucket is the development side of things. So that’s someone who’s got an amazing block of land and it makes sense to build a hotel so they get the permits, and they eventually want to build the hotel and then sell it on completion. That’s where we will come in, which is typically a longer process. Obviously, we try to get in with the relationship as soon as we possibly can. And CBRE, we have a full suite of services so we tap into different services in the earliest stages to be able to provide advice to them in terms of market evidence. What are supply and demand metrics are like in the local area? Should they be building an upscale hotel? Should they be building a luxury hotel? And really understanding the dynamic of what is the right answer for what they should be building for that subject property that they’re going to build and then from there, we can provide advice in terms of project management. So how to build it, how big should the rooms be? All the way through to opening an asset management. So typically in the hotel world, it makes sense to stabilize an asset and get it opening and trading and that takes anywhere between three to five years now thanks to COVID it’s taking a little bit longer for hotels to stabilize. So we can help hotel owners asset manage their properties on their behalf if they don’t know how to run a hotel. And then eventually when the time comes to sell that’s where we’re engaged to sell the real estate encumbered by a management agreement or lease depending on the owner. And then the third bucket which I’ll touch on is really just going to an owner who is not actively selling we’ve got a fantastic offer on the market on the buy side and we put it in front of them and it’s too good to refuse now, that can be typically so I’ll say that again. Now that can be the quickest format of a deal structure that can happen you know as a means to incentivize the owner to sell that could be cash on conditional offer on contract and could happen very quickly. Alternatively, if you look you know, the time it takes to negotiate a deal and the intricacies that come with each contract could take many many months if not years.

Bart: Gotcha. Wow, I look so there’s so much to unpack through this. I think I really want to start off with understanding if you look at that first bucket that you were talking about, so that’s someone that’s got a hotel and they’re looking to sell and I can imagine knowing, knowing the life that if you’re looking to sell a business like a hotel, it’s not hey, I want to sell it next year. It’s almost like you want to be thinking about it through the whole journey of the hotel. And I can imagine that some people would call you and say hey, we want to sell a hotel and a new policy. I wish you’d called me three years ago. What is that journey like trying to sell a hotel when should we start thinking about it?

Gibson: Depends on the ownership. So private equity typically has a five to 10-year investment lifecycle as a lot of funds do so they are planning ahead and they’ll have thoughtful capex investment where by x date they should have hoped to spend the money that they want to spend on the hotel to reposition and then that allows them to re-position the business and trade it up to do it and the end result sell the business on year five to seven, whatever that might be. In the case of private high net worth, he might have other motives other businesses that he’s got more focus going into and he might have owned the hotel for some time and the capital value might invest significantly and look to exit just by taking advantage of the real estate value and liquidate accordingly. So each kind of scenario is very different. 

I don’t think we’ve ever in my 14 years of brokerage, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the same transaction happen twice. If I’m talking about a vanilla process, how does the standard process unfold? Typically we would have a relationship with most of the owners in the market. If we did look at the number of hotel owners in the Asia Pacific there is not a whole lot of them and there are definitely good relationships with each one. So we try to keep in touch with them as much as we possibly can to understand their motives, and what their holding strategies are for their fund for the specific asset. And if it’s a hole, then we want to over-service them because, at the end of the day, they could be a buyer of another asset that might not be available yet but they could be a buyer in the future. So keeping close to active buyers and owners in the market is equally important. 

But when you look at a standard process, so let’s say you own a hotel, and you’ve decided, you know, had this hotel for 10 years, now’s the time I want to sell it, how do I do it? So we would ask for detailed financials of the hotel’s performance. We’d ask for property plans, just to really understand the hotel on its whole and then we go walk through the hotel with you just to get a real true understanding of how it’s positioned in the market. And we’d also look at the comparables in that subject property market to get a feel for you know, its upside and where the opportunity exists. At the end of the day, we’re selling the business as well as the real estate. So unlike an office tower, where it’s encumbered by at least at Telstra for 50 years at CPI, you know, you’re going to get rent for CPI and Chris for the next 50 years. In the event of being a hotel owner under a management agreement, you are praying to the market so like with COVID If there’s no one paying for room nights in your hotel, you’re not going to make any money. The manager’s obligation is to perform on your behalf and field and put bums on beds effectively and get a profit for you. And obviously, the market is not normal with pandemics so we like to kind of see a stabilized period that kind of ignores all that and looks through it. 

Bart: I mean like right now you’re on your numbers just doesn’t mean much in most countries are I like he can’t look back to the past two years ago. That was a good period because you can’t really predict. And not only that, historically you don’t have data that’s kind of real, because everything’s changing so quickly and then look into the future probably even worse now than when we were touring COVID Because of all the inflation numbers are what people are traveling but it’s a how to have like, how do you feel the current market conditions have affected the ability to value a property or to understand what revenue is predicted to happen?

Gibson: Sure. I think when you look at the hotel as an asset class, just scrubbing your comment on inflation. The hotel assets sector as an investment sector has historically, materially outperformed inflation. And that’s why yes, it takes the biggest hit when the pandemic start but unlike the retail sector, they bounce back the fastest you know you you are privy to the market and if you have a look at the regional luxury sector in Australia, those drive to destinations no one was going to America or Europe or barley for the holidays. They were staying in our backyard and really exploring our backyard which was you know, the silver lining of COVID for the Australian tourism sector.

And that allowed you know places like that offered a unique experience great accommodation. It allowed them to be able to drive rate and therefore profit to a point that well exceeded where they were in 2019. So when you look at 2020 2020 21, and even now even with borders open, they’re still well well and truly outperforming 29 2019 levels to a point that, you know, it’s almost like how do I forecast where it’s going to sit in the future and we’re finding for those properties it is hard but it’s typically a balance of somewhere between 2019 Being historical pandemic and then 2020 2021 being the super profit period where you’re experiencing high demands 90 plus percent occupancy rates 20-30% up on where they were pre pandemic so it’s quite a fascinating change where she looked at the CBD markets, Sydney CBD, one of the hottest institutional investment markets in the world. We commonly get requests for you know, I want to freehold 200 Round vacant possession hotel in the middle of the city that’s available to buy and tell me where that is because we just we don’t see that come available. So you look at the landscape of owners and Sydney, even Melbourne. Long-term generational owners and they’re not selling so when a pandemic comes on, where they might have 90% of their business attributed to nonhospitality businesses overseas. It might be for them about liquidating a headache when this is the opportunity to come into Sydney CBD. 

And because of the amount of cash that’s raised in the private equity space, we are seeing, you know, sale transaction volumes take over where it was pre pandemic despite profits being well below where has historically been. So the buyers for that through those types of processes are we’re really selling them what the recovery is like in those respective markets. You know, Sydney is going to bounce back CBD-wise hotel performances will bounce back the rates, the occupancies it’s they’re ahead of budgets. And the money’s still there. I mean, yes, there are inflation concerns, but there’s a lot of money raised on the sidelines and then looking for quality transactions. And in Australia, it is not a lot of that so when they come available that they’re still hotly sought after despite the turbulence over the recent months.

Bart: And I think that’s the thing is that right now we have a lot of unpredictability, right and what we are saying is hey, that that the sector’s done very, very well, depending on where you’re located, and so now just isn’t going to continue or is it going to change and how will change and how are people going to move around? Are people going to travel more? Can they travel more because of the airlines and that sort of stuff? But I’m digressing a little bit when I kind of go back a little bit to the selling side so you’ve you’re gonna go do a walk through because obviously, you’re saying that it’s you’re not just selling the asset you’re actually selling the business as well. And what are the steps in the process are you guys taking?

Gibson: Yes, so we’ll provide you with advice in terms of what we think the asset looks like. So we’ve got all the information from your hotel we can see the past five years of financials and we can have a walk the property we can see that you know, the meeting space is maybe too much for the subject hotel, and your occupancy is through the roof, you need more hotel rooms. So maybe it’s maybe we convert that meeting space to 20 more hotel rooms or we can get some value-added out of that. So when we go to pitch and we kind of bake these ideas into what the next owner would want to see move forward and how they should be underwriting how they should be buying it effectively. 

So we provide you with advice in terms of how we market it. So that’s from using online resources as you know, hotel conversation.com to give those guys a plug real estate.com You know, news articles, all the way through to you know, our databases, which is the primary source of interest. And then we run a kind of a value assumption on the hotel, what we think it’s worth and we provide that I guess overview to you as the owner, you’ll say great, but I want to sell for x, not y, which is what we’ve provided you and we might be close enough for there to be a process that we can run out. And that would be creating a document that sells the dream. So an information memorandum it’s a 20 to 40-page document that you can understand the property without having to physically go and see it. 

And then we complement that with a data room with all the information from laundry contracts to staffing contracts stuff that is not the more the nitty-gritty of the deal. 

We then present the opportunity to qualified institutional buyers that are active, as well as private high net worth, and we say this is the opportunity. This is what the client wants and this is why it’s worth that much. We run that process for five weeks and on the last day of the fifth week we call for offers nonbinding where we hope to receive dozens of bids and we say, here are the best five and these are the reasons why and that’s because you’ve bought hotels before. You’ve just bought something around the corner. You’ve just raised capital and you’re ready to spend money. So qualified money we know you’re actively buying and looking for opportunities. And we’ll give you our advice in terms of what’s the best offer and why.

And we’ll kind of rank it on a matrix so to speak. From there we give you a shortlist process where it’s about a two-week process to pick the best buyer. And from there we can understand who is the outlier and who’s the buyer for this property. And then we move to typical heads of agreement or a contract that is subject to due diligence period so they can complete cross checks with their lawyers and auditors to understand. Cross Check the income cross-check the contracts and the real estate title, which takes anywhere from four weeks to three months typically. Upon completion of that, then defects will be exchanged with the deal effectively becomes unconditional and then it moves to the settlement where the money goes from one bank account to the other. So when you’re looking at that first phone call when you call me and said Hey, Tom, I want to sell my hotel, to getting money in the bank on average, it’s about seven, seven to eight months.

Bart: and then so I’m super interested. So someone gives you a call and they say so. Obviously, you’ve got groups that already have everything in the plan. So they’ve kind of planned it all out and they’ll know whether they’re hitting their metrics and their numbers to be able to sell. But then there’ll be another group that doesn’t really know just yet whether they’re in a good position to sell or not, how often does that happen?

Gibson: happens over time. I mean, I think especially now with with COVID You know, we are very closely working with owners to give them advice. You should be looking to, you know, engage this group, or if it’s an owner-operated hotel and you don’t have management in place and you’re not getting the distribution that a manager will provide it. As I’m sure Richard Crawford from Marriott told you that that is so critical. So unless you don’t have that kind of brand IP value, where people go to stay at your hotel or you don’t offer that location that can derive that rate and occupancy. It’s critical to have a quality manager in place that can perform that on your behalf. And that could be one of the advice, you should maybe talk to Marriott or Hilton or hire Dirac or TFP you know the list goes on. 

So, that’s one avenue another might be you know, changing the business mix of the of their asset and maybe investing some money if they’ve got the capacity to, to take it to another level and get more profit and extract more profit and therefore value out of it. So, you know, that’s one avenue. If it’s a timing issue, we might say, look, now’s not the best time, maybe pump the brakes, let’s see where we are. And we might, you know, give them an informal underwriting at that time just to understand where their values are. And that might change you know, in six months’ time when they pick up the phone again and say, you know, we’ve done this and that and we’ve got this agreement and that business now here, does that change the business profile and the value so we’ll pick up the tools again and revalue the business so to speak. Yes, it’s different.

Bart: So let’s say you are privately managed, and let’s say the numbers aren’t where you want them to be. It might be worth going with a bigger group and lose profitability just so that you get more revenue to be in a better position to sell. Does that math make sense that I just

Gibson: Yeah, it does. Look, I think everyone always looks when they get into a management engagement conversation. They look at the fees that they’re paying, but it’s always good to see the trees through the forest and sorry, the other way around, through the forest through the trees and understand that, you know, that they’re adding value there. You know, there is a balance point where it does make sense, and whether that’s the room size or the rate that derives that but it gets to a point where it doesn’t make sense to extract more out of the business by engaging a third party manager who has an unrivaled skill set and doing that. You know, when you look at luxury lodges typically run mom and dad businesses, you know, regional hotels, they might be performing excellently but there are managers out there that can manage on their behalf and take the tools away from them on a kind of a daily risk one of you so the big box hotels that we see in cities, it’s horses for courses is this kind of a management brand for each type of hotel building, but it’s the same goes again you know, five own a 300 room hotel on the outskirts of Sydney and it’s not performing as much as I would have liked it too because you know, hotel PT while TD doesn’t get the brand name out there, then I might go to a manager who’s got the brand that distribution can plug it in and take it to another level. And therefore the value of my hotel to another level.

Bart: And when you’re doing the analysis of you know whether a hotel is performing well or not, obviously we can look at profit numbers, you know, well yes as profitable or not. And we have these sort of expectations but quite often as well, that can be comparable to everybody else. So you go oh, well, I’m super profitable. It’s like yeah, but those guys are four times more profitable. We’re in the middle of COVID and you should be doing way better. So therefore we actually you know, you’re not doing as good a job, you guys comparing different assets are very similar when you are kind of putting together the valuation 

Gibson: We do a myriad of different value assumptions, and one of them is typically a benchmarking analysis to look at what comparable hotels are doing on a like-for-like basis. So you might own a hotel and down the road, there’s one that’s a copy paste the exact same and their rate might be you know, $50 higher than yours. So we try and under a will, you can very quickly understand that that is an opportunity for a new owner to say, you know, that hotel is doing the higher rate you shouldn’t be performing that level. So we do a cross-check of market dynamics on a macro level being supply-demand issues, but then also on a more sensitive level being you know, subject property benchmarking and kind of pulling out the tools in terms of you know, what should this whole Tell me where’s the opportunity? Because as I say, it’s not, it’s not just a real estate transaction, it’s real estate and business transaction, where you really are either working with a manager like a Marriott Hilton Hyatt, all those guys. Or you’re running it yourself obviously, which takes more expertise. So it really depends on a case by case, but it’s, there are so many different variable factors to kind of confirm the value. And yeah, there’s that’s definitely a critical piece to it.

Bart: And then, the next bit that you said it earlier on you said you package it up and then you kind of create the dream, or you’re selling the dream. And I completely understand that. But in terms of selling a hotel, it’s termed this buyer’s perspective, right? So you’re going to be looking at your, I guess what I would call an avatar of your buyer, you know, who are my buyers? What do they look like? What are they looking for? What is their dream when you bought it? Yeah. How does that look? Is it just money?

Gibson: No, it’s the dream of taking the hotel to another level and where it is today and comparing it to where it should be and selling that growth. That’s the dream that I alluded to you know, when you look at the hotel investment, asset class, it is notoriously one of the more riskier asset classes. So as an advisor, how do I de-risk that to the investment community? How can I package it up in a way where you know this is a no-brainer I should be buying this for these reasons. 

And I’ve done my due diligence and it stacks up. So we do that by looking at the debt funding point of view. So we’ll get advice from lenders, non-Bank and Bank lenders in the market to understand where their lending terms are for the subject hotel and get a few options for the investment market to review and pursue on their own accord or with us. We’ve got our own team internally that helped with that. And then also from an asset management point of view. We have an asset management team that we hold the hand of owners and buyers to say this is what you should be doing moving forward and here is the growth and this is what the growth looks like. 

When you extract that. I guess there are opportunity opportunities out of the hotel. So you’ve got the debt, you’ve got the asset management, and then you’ve got the investment sales and advisory side so we provide evidence in terms of you know, what’s happening in the market on the transaction point of view, and that helps to grow your value and understand the market fundamentally but also how the trajectory and how the, I guess the lifeline of this lifecycle, rather of this hotel investment will be and you know, I’m going to exit in seven years and I’m going to roughly exit for this price.

Bart: So in hotels, what, what percentage of people or owners would you say got a five 7-10 year plan? 

Gibson: Well, then you should rewind back before the pandemic productivity was not a significant bar of hotels. We were fortunate to do a couple of them with the active guys in the market, though. It’s predominantly owned by high net worth individuals, private institutions, as we call it, so you Singaporean billionaires who have institutions that own multiple hotels, and then yeah, the private high net worth individual buyers and Property Groups in Australia, that have significantly changed to where we are now in the market. I think private equity takes up only about a third of all the buyers and you’ve got high net worth taking the other third, and then the other remaining third being investment managers. So representing capital to go invest on their behalf. 

They’re the three main buckets of buyers that we’re dealing with right now. And it’s someone’s pain. It’s someone else’s opportunity. And as we’re seeing now with the pandemic and banks coming off with the incentives to keep the stress at bay it’s definitely distress and we’re not seeing it in terms of pricing, but if you pull back the curtain of the owners, you can definitely see there is some layer of distress and as we move forward with inflation and labor cost issues it is there’s going to be some opportunities though, the amount of buyers inversely on the buy side and the amount of capital raise that we’re dealing with is kind of offsetting that discount, at least that’s what we’re seeing in transactions that we’re doing now.

Bart: We’re getting towards the end of my questions. We talked before we got started that each of these buckets that we’re talking about. It could be a day, a month, or a week of consulting to unpack all these bits and these different bits and pieces. So, you know, I think even from a top level, there’s some great value to be had in terms of things that people can think about when they are approaching their businesses and selling it and things to actually think about and those opportunities and it doesn’t. 

All of this stuff transfers between a really small business up to a large one. The one question that I had to sort of close us off and it’s just a bit of personal interest. You talked about creating that opportunity and finding the opportunities and selling the dream in terms of hey, this is what you could do with this particular asset. This is where it’s valued at blah, you can do blah and then not only you’re going to use the profitability but you also increase the value of the asset so I completely understand that, and then you can go through and you can, you know, change teams, you can change the structure in the business do you get as granular as looking at technology because we talked about technologies just before we got started and my gut feeling is that, you know, we’ve, we talk about all the time technology is changing the future or going to be needed to change everything in the business and to become more profitable, more efficient. But as we get more distressed, then we need to leverage or find new opportunities because there are only so many times you can renovate a room is what I’m getting at. How much is technology going to play in the future of your pitches? And creating more value?

Gibson: It’s a very question. Pre-pandemic, it probably was minimal. We had no emphasis on looking at technology, as the world evolved and as critical and as high costs of labor are today, especially in the hotel segment. You got to get a really forensically look at where are the opportunities in my profit and loss statement in order to be able to save money and make money effectively. And you know, as recently as a few months ago, we did a hotel review for a client and we compare their profit loss statement to others in the sector, we could see that their information and technology systems were costs were very updated. 

And that was an opportunity for them and we realized something in the order of about a million dollars of value uplift just by changing an agreement from one system to another system. So as granular as that but then also, when we work on proposals and even track live transactions. The critical nature of being in a big company like this is the force of the team and the full-service nature that we offer. We work with a value valuations team and research team but we also work with the asset management team and when we’re working with asset managers to understand where the value is in the hotel profit loss statement, they’re going to review it with a fine tooth comb to really pull apart what the hotel is doing right and what the hotel is doing wrong. And a lot of the wrong side relates to technology and investment, and really that’s where the opportunity is to save money. So we do provide that advice as early as our pitch but also through servicing buyers to give them comfort to know that you know with an X investment in technology, you can look to save Y and create value.

Bart: I can see so many opportunities to talk to you again, particularly talking about international markets. We didn’t even cover that today. We didn’t cover developers and developing hotels and that sort of thing which is a sewn bag of fish called fish. So if anyone needs to contact them directly to set you on the right path and get you engaged in that path if it’s of interest. I want to say thank you so much for joining us on the show and just providing value. It’s you know you’re you’ve taken your time out of your day just to sit down and try to help other people out so it’s super appreciated. Is there any way that people can reach out to you to keep in touch?

Gibson: Yes, absolutely. LinkedIn, email, I mean, we can share those details accordingly. But I’m effectively a real estate agent. So the more contact the merrier.

Bart: Yeah, great. I look. We’ll put all your links in the show notes and for those of you that are listening and enjoying our content, make sure you give us a like, give us a subscribe. It really does make a difference and allows me to keep interviewing awesome people like Tom and keep the show going and providing value to everybody. Tom, thank you. Thank you very much. Once again, have a great rest of the day. 

Gibson: Thanks very much, Bart.

Unknown 4:39

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