Journal
Field notes and press.
A collection of our thoughts, industry pieces and press releases that relate to our journey. Sources are named and linked at the foot of every piece.
On small hotels as an asset class
Four piecesA hotel reprices every morning. No other building does.
An office signs a ten-year lease. A hotel earns its rate again at breakfast. That single difference is why hospitality rewards an owner who stays close to the asset, whichever company signs the payroll.The flag is not the safe harbour it is sold as.
Preferred Hotels & Resorts and PHG Consulting went through a decade of STR and HVS data and found independents ahead of hard brands and franchise soft brands on rate and RevPAR, before franchise fees are even counted. Why we stay unencumbered.This year gets won on cost discipline, not on demand.
The takeaway we kept coming back to after ALIS: results now turn on operator discipline, infrastructure and financial clarity rather than on the market doing the work. What that looks like at eight-to-seventy-key scale.Capital is taking independent sponsors more seriously.
Deal-by-deal used to be what a sponsor did until it could raise a fund. Allocators now have several ways to back a manager before there is a fund at all, and the reasons behind the shift hold up better than the old assumption did.On the four markets
Four piecesCannon Beach, OR – the renowned art town on a breathtaking shoreline.
Oregon made its entire shoreline public in 1967, and Travel + Leisure has since called this the happiest beach in America. Four of our hotels sit inside roughly one square mile of a town that cannot expand, which tells you most of what you need to know about new supply here.Only ninety minues north of Napa sits the little known, world class wine region.
Wine Enthusiast named Mendocino its American Wine Region of the Year for 2024, crediting the greenest farming in California. Getting there is still a two-lane road through a preservation district and it calls back memory of Napa and Sonoma valleys decades ago.Anderson Valley makes serious pinot and almost no noise.
The Mendocino Voice covered this year's harvest, the earliest on record, alongside the problem the valley has never solved: visibility. Eight keys at the Anderson Valley Inn, forty minutes from the coast, and a wine region most people still cannot place on a map.A national park, a music scene, and sixty-nine keys at the gate.
Field Station Joshua Tree joined the portfolio in 2026 and is the first Avenir hotel away from the Pacific. Where to eat in Yucca Valley, what happens in Pioneertown, and why the high desert reads like a coastal market with different weather.Further reading
Elsewhere- CBRE — A New Horizon: The Case for an Inflationary Bull Market in Hotel Real Estate
- Bay Street Hospitality — How LPs Evaluate Hospitality Private Equity Funds
- Thesis Driven — The GP Studio
- Hotel Investor Apps — Industry Outlook 2026: Margin Defense
- BLLA / JLL Capital Markets — Boutique Hotels Are Booming: Why Capital Markets Are Doubling Down on Independent Assets
- National Park Service — Tourism to Joshua Tree National Park creates $214 million in economic benefit
- Skift — Lark Hotels and Life House team up to manage lifestyle properties
- Wine Enthusiast — Mendocino, American Wine Region of the Year
- Travel + Leisure — Cannon Beach, the happiest beach in the U.S.
- The Mendocino Voice — Anderson Valley's earliest harvest meets its oldest problem