Odis Martin

My wife and I met early in college. We went to grad school together and designing and running a private island resort in Belize was our master's thesis. My father owned a small resort in Belize and my wife worked at a boutique hotel in Point Arena, California. We were inspired by a trip we took to the Cayes in Belize in 2003 and began our search for property. We realized all the funding hurdles and immediately decided to invest in multi-family residential and commercial real estate in California and continue working full-time. Over the years we have refined our business processes and now we have 20 doors in our multi-unit real estate rental portfolio. We expanded rapidly before 2008, learned a lot, had to right size coming out of the recession. We started to look for more diversified investment opportunities. The island property came into our purview; we purchased the raw land and began the journey of building a resort from the ground up in 2011. We saw a lot of beauty in the natural wonders around the island, but we did not anticipate all of the challenges. We set a date of 8-18-2018 and we opened completely self-funded with 2 units, and we successfully became fully licensed as a small boutique hotel. We operated those two units successfully as a proof of concept. Our first guests were actually tenants of ours from California that were super stoked about our journey. We were booked out and, on the upswing, when then the pandemic hit. Belize was the first country to shut its borders and we had to cancel all our bookings and regroup. We decided to begin our next chapter of the journey by rapidly expanding our property into a 22 unit resort with a restaurant, dive-shop, library, gym, yoga studio, and night-sky observatory.