Don’t forget that the hotel business is at the end of the day all about bricks and mortar. When transitioning a property with all of the action of operations and personnel make sure you get behind the scenes and get a quick handle on how the building really works or doesn’t.
Start on the roof and work your way to the basement. You will get to see systems that are patched or broken or atrophied and abandoned. Usually every issue has a back story and the best keeper of those stories will be a shift engineer. This is what I call the forensics of the building, the witness marks of prior problems. It will tell you the talent level of the property team and also the asset philosophy and expertise of the owners and management companies past and present.
Once in an overcrowded hotel basement that dated back to the 1920’s I could see where every time a new system or new wires were run no one removed the old. You ended up with generations of redundant pipes and wires. In one situation, ten years earlier, the hotel had converted to city steam and had bypassed the old boiler system and fuel bunker. You could tell that the tax credits that were used for the crossover did not have an allowance for the removal of the old. Fast forward to the present a whole section of the basement had a rusted out boiler system that was going to cost a new owner major money to cut up and remove.
davidmalcolmgibbons@gmail.com
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Start on the roof and work your way to the basement. You will get to see systems that are patched or broken or atrophied and abandoned. Usually every issue has a back story and the best keeper of those stories will be a shift engineer. This is what I call the forensics of the building, the witness marks of prior problems. It will tell you the talent level of the property team and also the asset philosophy and expertise of the owners and management companies past and present.
Once in an overcrowded hotel basement that dated back to the 1920’s I could see where every time a new system or new wires were run no one removed the old. You ended up with generations of redundant pipes and wires. In one situation, ten years earlier, the hotel had converted to city steam and had bypassed the old boiler system and fuel bunker. You could tell that the tax credits that were used for the crossover did not have an allowance for the removal of the old. Fast forward to the present a whole section of the basement had a rusted out boiler system that was going to cost a new owner major money to cut up and remove.
davidmalcolmgibbons@gmail.com
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