First-Time Hotel Owners: How They Financed A Hotel After 61 Banks Said No | Adam Walz & Micah Thomas E97
RSS Feed Adam Walz and Micah Thomas are the co-founders of Comeback Hospitality, and they are converting The Wesley, a 1960s roadside motel in Page, Arizona, into a 50-room boutique hotel.
To finance it, they took 61 no's before the 62nd bank said yes. As Micah puts it, financing a negative cash-flowing, unflagged hotel in a tertiary market is not something most lenders want anything to do with.
In this episode, Adam and Micah walk through how the deal came together, starting with a property listed at $6 million that they picked up for $3.3 million, putting them in at roughly $67,000 a key against a market average Micah puts at $115,000. They get into how two first-time owners built the capital stack, why they took the SBA 7(a) over the cheaper 504, and what went sideways along the way, including their largest investor walking away in the middle of the raise and a renovation that ran long and over budget, all while the hotel stayed open for business.
Micah also talks openly about living in room seven for the better half of six months while construction happened around him, and gives a straight answer on whether he would do it again. If you are underwriting your first commercial hospitality deal and you want to hear what the spreadsheet does not tell you, from two guys who just went through it, this is that conversation.
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