Below is a collection of thoughts and short articles that offer more insight into our way of thinking about our industry, the luxury SFL asset class, and our business.

• Why we love the luxury vacation rental (SFL) asset class.

• Scaling the luxury SFL operation.

• Our acquisition principles.

• Why we do all of our own market research, data collection, and regression analyses in-house.

• Why we focus obsessively on unlevered yield.

In our world, big hurts you, and what often seems counterintuitive is actually where the most value is created. True value in luxury real estate isn’t created from a spreadsheet or in the size of a portfolio. It’s created with proper execution at the asset level, with thoughtful design and evidence-backed luxury marketing strategy. And if you look closely, that’s extremely rare in the space right now, even at the local level.

Larger VRMs with a lot of assets in the same market thrive with uniformity and rapid capital injection for scalability for their business models to work efficiently. And exclusively local based managers also have too much local bias, and lack the ongoing international experience to fulfill the marketing and asset management requirements for maximizing returns on multi-million dollar real estate at the international level.

Both of these models work against you in the luxury segment, which naturally requires tact, exceptionalism, rarity, and devout understanding of the international luxury real estate and capital market trends to create value.

This is why we only onboard one property at a time and intentionally cap the number of assets we manage at just 4 per market and 100 total. You can learn more detail about this here.

Our leadership brings deep experience across luxury real estate, hospitality, and institutional CRE.

Personally, I’ve spent fourteen years studying, working, and investing in luxury real estate, building on a family background in luxury construction. That matters a great deal in an industry where almost anyone can post a property online and call themselves a manager, or present themselves as an “operator” while outsourcing every function and simply managing spreads.

In contrast, I’ve built a diversified team with proven frameworks that consistently deliver property revenues in the top 1% of all luxury vacation rental managers globally. Beyond team performance, I personally manage high-end renovation projects that have generated significant equity multiples and achieved record-breaking sales per square foot.

So, aside from the fact that we outperform 99% of all managers and operators in our industry? The result is specialization. Because of my unique background and the team I’ve assembled, we understand how to create and capture massive value in luxury real estate at a level very few can match.

Anyone who knows me well also knows that I always choose the side of what is measurable and clear.

I believe instincts and intuition are sharpened over time, but also that the information needed to make the right decisions is almost always easily available — you just have to look.

I always prefer a sure thing (or as close as you can get to it) and we structure all our investment and management decisions based on these beliefs. That’s how we generate strong risk-adjusted returns for our partners.

In short, any market where the economics at the asset level make sense is a smart opportunity.

However, we like markets with historically outsized luxury rental demand, all year round. We like markets with outsized historical growth rates, typically CAGRs of 8%+ or higher, especially where rare assets can experience even more accelerated appreciation.

I also like markets that perform exceptionally well during times of crisis and economic distress (like the recent COVID 19 global pandemic). 

Neither of these requirements can be achieved outside of destination markets that have a rare draw and a uniqueness that makes them intrinsically more valuable than others. And I do not believe in following hype or making long-term decisions based on short term trends.

For obvious reasons, any investments outside of these rare destination markets will grow at a much slower organic rate, or will be subject to much more volatility. 

We do have a number of red flag show-stoppers that we hold inviolate. For example, we don’t like lawsuits, insufficient predictability of rental demand, regulatory uncertainty, financial engineering, or construction defects.

Those are the obvious ones. Other red flags include contempt for unfulfilled potential, value strategy misalignment, and overly optimistic projections.