EPISODE 58: Listen to This Before Investing in Hotels - Interview with Diya Liu

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Interview with Diya Liu, STR and hotel investor on her strategy, process, and what she looks for when investing.

1. Diya, can you walk us through a little bit of your story, how you started investing in motels and hotels and sort of demystify this, make it like approachable for anyone listening who wants to do this themselves?

2. Can you go into a little more details on how you got the financing for this 46 unit deal in the Ozarks?

3. Can you explain a little bit what that is and how if anyone's listening, how they could either contribute to your fund or how people can set up their own?

4. How long did it take you to do the renovations? You said you put about 500,000 into it and it was 46 units, this one in the Ozarks. Yeah. How, how long did that take?

5. What are some of the things that you have to account for when you start working on a hotel and managing that versus a standard short term rental?

6. What are kind of some of the things you ran into when it came to buying commercial? Like what did the bank wanna see?

7. So far, have you purchased, have any of your hotel deals been franchised hotels or you're just now for the first time possibly dealing with this?

8. What's the discussion kind of behind the scenes with your team on choosing to stay under the Wyndham brand or leaving it behind?

9. Would you recommend starting with a franchised brand or look for like a mom and pop place to buy out?

10. What would you look for in a first deal? As far as like location, number of bedrooms close to certain attractions or anything like that. I don't know. Could you like walk us through your thought process with this?

11. I like your thought process with that. I'd love to know a little bit about what numbers you look for. So with short-term rentals, we've all heard that 20% cash on cash is kind of what investors are looking for. Is that the same with a hotel deal?

12. How does it work with an auction? Did you talk to your team first before the auction and secure like a certain amount going into it? Or are you out there bidding for what you think is right?

13. Is there like a certain metric, like an amount to spend per room with the purchase and with the remodel?

14. What do you account for with designing boutique hotels? And then follow up with that, how do you execute designs in that when you're doing that many units?

15. I'd love to know your perspective too on like the lobby areas and gyms and you kind of talked about having like a business center or like pools, like some of those more general amenities that people operating short-term rentals don't really have to deal with.

16. Do you charge like you're renting the space to Starbucks, for example, or is it like a profit share model or same with a restaurant or anything you were to add like that? How does that work exactly?

17. What are your goals are for you and your team as you guys continue growing?

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