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The Hotel Investor Playbook
Welcome to The Hotel Investor Playbook, hosted by real estate investor and hospitality operator Michael Russell. Michael is the co-founder of Malama Capital and Howzit Hostels, and has built a personal real estate portfolio exceeding $20 million.
With an operator-first mindset, Michael brings a practical perspective to hotel investing. On the show, he breaks down what it actually takes to scale from short-term rentals into boutique hotels, covering deal sourcing, operations, capital strategy, and risk.
Each week, Michael shares real lessons from the field as he builds toward a $400 million real estate business, giving listeners an honest look at the decisions, challenges, and strategies behind the growth. Subscribe and follow along as he documents the journey in real time.
The Hotel Investor Playbook
Latest Episodes
First-Time Hotel Owners: How They Financed A Hotel After 61 Banks Said No | Adam Walz & Micah Thomas E97
Adam Walz and Micah Thomas are the co-founders of Comeback Hospitality, and they are roughly 30 days from opening The Wesley, a 1960s roadside motel in Page, Arizona they are converting into a 50-room boutique hotel. To buy it, they called 62 b...
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The Follower Count Myth: How One Resort Went From $30K To $300K A Month In Direct Bookings | Dustin Baker E96
Dustin Baker runs Hidden Gem Media, a performance marketing agency built to pull hospitality brands off the OTAs and onto direct bookings. By his account, one client resort went from roughly thirty thousand dollars a month in direct bookings to...
$1 Billion SBA Insider: How To Buy A Hotel With Just 15% Down | Carly Whitney E95
Carly Whitney is a Senior Vice President at Business Finance Capital, a certified development company, and in thirteen years there she has been across more than a thousand SBA transactions. By her own count, that adds up to roughly four billion...
Wall Street Trader Turned Hotel Broker: The Deal 40 Brokers Couldn't Close | Amiti Bhow E94
A 33-key Art Deco hotel in Miami sat on the market for five years. Forty brokers tried to sell it and failed. Amiti Bhow, Vice President at NewGen Advisory, finally got it done, not because she found a higher price, but because she found a buye...
The PhD Economist Who Buys Hotels and Turns Them Into Apartments | Alexander Cartwright E93
Alexander Cartwright is a PhD economist who left a tenured professorship to buy distressed hotels and convert them into workforce housing through his company, HotelSHIFT. His business rests on a simple valuation gap: hotels trade at higher cap ...