Hospitality: The Power of Developing Unique Real Estate Assets With Ben Wolff, Real Finds Podcast #40 Transcript
Ben Wolff: I think there’s a perceived risk that is not reality when it comes to these properties. I really do believe that. They’re different, so they’re perceived as risky, whereas in reality they’re less risky because they’re different.
Gordon Lamphere: Welcome to the Real Finds Podcast, where we interview voices shaping the real estate industry, entrepreneurship, and our world. On today’s podcast, we sit down with Ben Wolff. Ben, known on Twitter as Unique Stays Guy, is co-founder of Onera, Oasi, and Blink Hospitality. He’s a leading entrepreneur in alternative lodging and a major voice in the movement to reshape hospitality. We discuss the power of unique products, methods for developing strong brands, and the future of the hospitality industry. If you’re an entrepreneur or a real estate investor, today’s discussion is well worth a listen. Ben, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Ben Wolff: Thanks for having me on, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: Why hospitality?
Ben Wolff: Ever since I was young, I enjoyed hosting people, showing them a good time, and creating one-of-a-kind experiences. That could be anything from a house party to a thirty-person group trip to the Dominican Republic with an insane villa and infinity pool and an amazing group of people. In college, I had an events and promotions company, and did some of that in New York City as well. From there I got into the real estate side with Airbnb, and now unique stays and landscape hotels.
Gordon Lamphere: What got you started on the real estate side?
Ben Wolff: My co-founder Jesse, who now runs all our social media, content marketing, digital marketing, and revenue management, had an upstart Airbnb management company back in 2014. My roommate and I had a big 2,000-square-foot loft in Flatiron, and it was the Super Bowl, and we thought about renting it on Airbnb. That ended up being a bust; it was negative five degrees and nobody cared. But it introduced me to Jesse and got the wheels turning around Airbnb and short-term rentals, which progressed into hotels.
The Groupthink Problem in Hotels
Gordon Lamphere: Is there an advantage to having started in Airbnb and moved into hotels, versus hotels moving toward Airbnb?
Ben Wolff: A hundred percent. There’s a massive groupthink issue in the hotel and hospitality world, and has been for decades. They all went to the same schools, read the same books, and listened to the same people, and there’s this idea that we’ve been doing it the same way for a long time and that’s the right way. We want to turn that on its head. There’s been very little innovation in hotels in fifty-plus years. The biggest innovation was loyalty rewards points, and that doesn’t excite me. They’ve done well with it and brought in the business traveler, but when it comes to leisure travel and one-of-a-kind experiences, and shareability in this new age of social media where everybody wants to share the most amazing things they’re doing, the bread-and-butter, heads-in-beds big box hotels have missed the mark and aren’t reinventing fast enough.
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s start with the good. What do big hotel chains do right?
Ben Wolff: They’re good at operations, at controlling and projecting costs, budgets, and P&Ls. They provide a relatively consistent experience and comfort, and they’re typically in good urban locations. All of that is great for the business traveler and the traveler who’s less discerning about where they stay and more focused on what they’re doing outside the stay. We believe the modern traveler cares a whole lot about where they’re staying and would happily pay double for an amazing space and spend less elsewhere. Where the big brands miss the mark is that hospitality in those hotels feels transactional. You feel like a number on a spreadsheet. Loyalty points are really about creating switching costs, and what’s more transactional than “you spent a lot of money at my hotel, so I’ll treat you better”? For us, it’s how can we be collaborative with our guests, co-pilots on the journey, and provide a one-of-a-kind, highly shareable memory? Whether it’s your first stay or your sixth, hopefully we treat you the same way with the same goal.
Building in Public
Gordon Lamphere: Where does that collaboration start? On social media? When you enter the property?
Ben Wolff: It typically starts on social media, or maybe a friend shares the property with you along with their own photos. And it can start even before we open. We’re now building in public, sharing everything from capital raising to architectural renderings and designs, the build process, the launch, and our numbers. That creates a fan base years before you open, and an emotional connection to the founder, the team, and the property. We’ve seen time and again that people love people, maybe like brands, and typically detest businesses. Steve Jobs, and now Tim Cook, Brian Chesky, Elon Musk: their personal followings are orders of magnitude bigger than their brands’ followings, and their announcements carry more weight. Having a connection to the founder and team is super important, and today’s consumer latches onto it. Another example, more building-in-public focused: Devin Loring created the Pacific Bin, a container home Airbnb in the middle of nowhere in Washington. Beautiful property, nothing around, and he’s amassed well over a million followers across socials by documenting the entire process. It’s one Airbnb, not a critically acclaimed hotel, and he has more followers than most really nice hotels.
Gordon Lamphere: Plenty of folks on real estate Twitter have built in public with varying success, some at attracting investment, some at brand loyalty. Where’s the ultimate value for you?
Ben Wolff: All of the above. My core company is Oasi, and I’m also the founder of Onera, the treehouse hotel in Fredericksburg, Texas, which has done really well. Oasi is raising money for new projects, right now for Oasi Hill Country, our most ambitious project yet, with the best views I’ve seen in Texas, where we’re building a one-of-a-kind landscape hotel. I’m always looking for people to add to the team: architects, designers, subcontractors. I have a GC who’s my core partner on these builds, and hopefully we keep building together because he’s great. We also provide social media and digital marketing, revenue management, property management, and design and development advisory, and we constantly get inbound because we share our results. Our audience has a connection to me. They feel like they know me from the podcasts I’ve been on, sharing vulnerable things like mistakes I’ve made and lessons learned, so there’s trust that we have their best interest at heart and understand what they’re going through opening a unique stays property without knowing where to start on management and marketing. That’s lead generation. And the final piece is the connection to the property, which builds a guest fan base. They want to stay at the property I developed because they feel a connection to me and know I’m trying to inspire and blow away guests. They’re enrolled in the mission.
Mistakes Made on the First Build
Gordon Lamphere: You mentioned vulnerable mistakes. The biggest downside of real estate Twitter is that everybody talks about their success stories and nobody talks about mistakes, and anyone in development or commercial real estate knows we’ve made plenty. What are some of your biggest?
Ben Wolff: Happy to dive in, and up front: we share our mistakes not just for our audience but for potential investors. If I’m open about my mistakes, investors know where we goofed and what we did to overcome it, which is more important than anything. If everything goes right, I don’t know what you look like when things go sideways, which they inevitably do.
Onera Fredericksburg was literally my first development project. I’d never built a house. It was mid-COVID, the supply chain was a mess, and the subcontractor landscape was a mess, so costs went through the roof. But they also went through the roof because I picked the wrong GC. I had a great design and architecture firm that designed amazing units, and we had them build too. In hindsight, I should have gone with the GC I work with now, who comes in on time and on budget and was realistic. The other firm showed me the budget I wanted to see, in line with my delusional expectations, whereas the GC I use now showed a budget probably forty percent higher, and I believe he would have hit it. I went with the cheaper bid, and it wasn’t a hard bid, it was cost-plus, which everyone was doing with COVID pricing, and we basically doubled what they put in front of me. Even with a tighter budget, we came in fifty percent over. I learned from that and raised bridge debt to cover the difference. Thankfully, we came out of the gate with very high ADRs and occupancies, $500-plus ADRs, some units over $600, and occupancy in the mid-to-high eighties or low nineties, because we went all in on a one-of-a-kind experience and being the best in the market. That overcame some of the cost hurdles.
One other mistake on that build: we sourced a bunch of the structures from manufacturers in China, and I’d never sourced from China. We worked with a broker and thought the broker was handling quality control and boots on the ground. That was far from the case. We were trying to save a couple hundred grand, and it cost us double that between delays and retrofitting, because a lot of parts came incorrect. One unit was two feet shorter in diameter than what we ordered after the footings had been poured, so we had to figure out what to put on those piers and disguised it with plants. We made all the mistakes in the book, but we invested where it counted: being the coolest, most unique, most novel treehouse hotel in the Texas Hill Country. We also benefit from geography. In central Texas, you can get to mediocre beaches in a few hours, West Texas is six hours, Mexico is similar, and there are four nice cities, but not the range of attractions you have in California or New York. If we can provide that, there’s a massive captive audience with disposable income that wants amazing experiences.
Why Unique Is Less Risky
Gordon Lamphere: How did you dial in on the amazing-experience idea? In traditional real estate, so many people are creating Class B and C industrial or office and just hitting spreadsheet metrics. There’s no uniqueness. Why target uniqueness rather than numerically sound properties?
Ben Wolff: Unique stays are very numerically sound as well. There’s a perceived risk that isn’t reality. They’re different, so they’re perceived as risky, whereas in reality they’re less risky because they’re different. If a thousand rooms come online in Fredericksburg, who gets hammered? The La Quinta and the Red Roof Inn, not Onera, because nobody’s investing in the units to the level we are. And the numbers jumped off the page before we built Onera. There were cool but not earth-shattering unique Airbnbs, three to five hundred square feet, doing over a hundred thousand dollars a year. I thought, can I be better and more novel than them? I think so, so maybe I can beat those numbers. We’re doing over $200,000 on similar-sized units at some of our unique stays, like the Monarch treehouse and Live Oak Lodge. Our nicer, more novel units are doubling what I underwrote. What’s riskier is going into a market with a ton of supply coming online and throwing in a commodity. That’s where you get burned.
Gordon Lamphere: Real estate bears talk about a glut of Airbnbs. Is uniqueness your moat against an Airbnb recession, versus the random two-bedroom in a major metro with middle-of-the-road reviews?
Ben Wolff: Make no mistake, there is a glut of Airbnbs, specifically commodity, undifferentiated Airbnbs, and there will continue to be consolidation and margin compression as supply comes online. Our moat is twofold. We’re willing to spend to make one-of-a-kind units, and we’re not as concerned with cost per key. We’re highly concerned with the P&L and the yield. Our return on cost is fifteen to twenty percent. Find me another commercial real estate asset class that consistently delivers a fifteen to twenty percent yield on cost. Second, the special sauce: we’re relentlessly focused on what the guest wants, which is shareability and one-of-a-kind experiences, and on how to reach them, which is Instagram and social media. We create engaging content that captivates the audience and evokes emotion. They’re scrolling Instagram getting dopamine hits, they come across Onera, we provide captivating content, and they say, I have to stay there, I have to take my partner there. They go to the booking site and don’t care if it’s $600 or $850. So we design spaces to show well on social media, to video and photograph well. Monarch and Spyglass, two of our most acclaimed units at Onera, taught us that. Monarch is shaped like a butterfly, offset with a double-peaked roof, and from the inside it’s hard to shoot. It’s hard to show the vaulted ceilings in the bedroom and the overhanging hammock in the living room in one shot because of how it’s cut up. Now we design for the shoot-through moment, so you see the unit in all its glory in one shot. That’s one of many learnings, and we constantly improve our designs for this new age of shareability.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve consolidated our office portfolio, a tough sector, and found something similar: unique properties and experiences are the only things that bring people into the office. Nobody wants to grind nine to five in a Class B office. How do you work with an architecture firm on a shoot-through design?
Ben Wolff: Today I do a lot of the early concepting myself, with marketing materials and renderings, and then we work with an architect willing to collaborate on the vision. It’s not easy to find an architect who delivers plans in a timely fashion and is highly willing to collaborate, so those are the two things we filter for. But I do a lot of the upfront concepting because we know what guests want. The shoot-through moment is as simple as, instead of separating Monarch’s two double-peaked rooms so you only catch the bedroom doorway from the living room, push them together so you can see eighty percent of the bedroom while shooting the living room. Simple tweaks so a photographer or videographer can get a better shot. I have videographers in house and work with tons of photographers and content creators, and I constantly ask them what I can do on the design side to make their job easier.
Working With Content Creators
Gordon Lamphere: How did you start working with content creators? I hate to throw out the B-word, but many of the boomer investors I work with don’t understand content creation at all.
Ben Wolff: That was another area of improvement for me. I don’t know if I’d ever sent an Instagram DM. I might as well have been a boomer myself. We launched on Airbnb with great revenues, and an influencer reached out asking to do a collab and a giveaway post. I didn’t even have a direct booking website, and I didn’t want bookings from her post feeding to Airbnb so they could take seventeen percent. So we spun up a direct booking site, mediocre at best, and had her come out. Her handle is Texas Explorer, her name is Amanda, and she’s fantastic. She had a couple hundred thousand followers when we worked with her and is close to a million now, two years later, known across central Texas as one of the best. She did about $25,000 to $30,000 in direct bookings for us across two posts in one month. That’s what I needed to see to say, I need to invest here. That first year, I fielded inbound from influencers myself and tapped Amanda for advice, which she graciously gave. It was thirty minutes a week, not a massive investment, and in 2022, our first full year, we did thirty percent direct bookings. I’ll acknowledge Onera was a one-of-a-kind product well suited to social media; with a different product, it would have been a harder lift.
In 2023, we tried to double down by hiring an agency, and we haven’t had the best experience with agencies. They show you views, impressions, likes, and followers, and I care about direct booking revenue. Followers are a vanity metric unless they lead to bookings, and nothing on their side was projected in terms of bookings. That led us to build the team internally. We now have a content and marketing team that’s bigger than the rest of my team: more than half of the thirteen or fourteen people at Oasi corporate are content and marketing. Videographers, copywriters, creative, social media managers, run by my co-founder Jesse. It’s valuable on every front: my personal brand, leads, building in public for future hotels, and investors. People see what we’ve done with Onera and with other properties we manage, since those owners have given us permission to share results, and now we get leads from folks who want us to market their properties. If you’re hiring a firm for social media or digital marketing, be very conscious of the metrics they use and whether they align with what you want. Very few agencies show the metrics that matter to a business owner. One of our pitches is that we’re owners, so we know how owners think, and we hold ourselves to direct bookings, conversions, and ultimately dollars. Impressions matter because they lead to conversions, but the end metric is dollars.
Gordon Lamphere: I couldn’t say it better. For our podcast, we get a lot of clicks from YouTube, and a YouTube view is worth a certain amount, but a Facebook or especially Twitter view of the same video is worth almost nothing. I can only imagine an agency selling you on Twitter view counts.
Finding Properties That Pencil
Gordon Lamphere: How do you target properties? It’s such a struggle to find uniqueness in real estate. How do you find unique properties that pencil?
Ben Wolff: Interesting question, because I no longer buy pre-existing unique stays. It’s a square peg in a round hole, trying to optimize what’s already built for shareability, when I can build from scratch and optimize it, make it that much more Instagrammable, and ensure it’s a novel design that blows guests away. People may not like hearing that, but you can control a lot more and ensure uniqueness building from scratch. When it comes to land, I’m passionate about how to pick it. Our new criterion is that when I or someone I bring to the site sees it for the first time, they need to have an autonomic response and whip out their phone to take a photo or video, because the view is so amazing, or the forest is so enchanting, or the river is so enticing. I’m also less constrained by needing to be near a major market or attraction. The property itself can be an attraction if the views are that amazing and the product is that shareable. We’ve seen it at Onera. Fredericksburg is one of the top driving destinations in central Texas, a cute pioneer-vibe town with shops, great food, museums, and Enchanted Rock state park nearby, and we see guests just hanging out the whole time in their treehouse with their loved one. We have a pool and a communal elevated deck tucked into a live oak grove, but it’s nothing like the amenities we’ll have at Oasi Hill Country: a spa, a gym, a restaurant, a bigger event space. Even without all that, guests choose to stay on site rather than go into Fredericksburg. So I’m looking at other locations with incredible land that might not be next to a town or attraction but are still an easy drive from wealthy major markets. Oasi Hill Country is an hour from Austin, an hour from San Antonio, and a few hours from Houston. When they see it on Instagram, they don’t say, I’ll only go if it’s in Fredericksburg. They say, those views are incredible, and it’s an hour away. I’m going.
Gordon Lamphere: Who’s your target demographic? I saw a piece, I think in the Wall Street Journal or Fortune, that Gen Z and younger millennials spend their wealth on experiences rather than long-term investing, and that’s what you’re selling. Does your demographic skew younger?
Ben Wolff: Our core demographic is probably twenty-five to fifty-five, and you’d be surprised at the number of guests over fifty-five, even sixty-five, at Onera. It’s not exclusive to the younger generation, but it does skew that way. We talk about an archetype: the modern traveler. The modern traveler cares about shareability and one-of-a-kind experiences, wants to collaborate with the property and the team, wants a warm experience with the founder or site manager, and wants to get away from the transactional hotel experience where you wait in line at the check-in desk and they ask how your day was because they’re paid to. The modern traveler is the person in the friend group everyone asks, where should I go for an anniversary or a trip with a new partner? They post on social about their experiences. Maybe they go to Burning Man or Coachella, have a Tesla and an Apple Watch. They’re tech forward and, in their friend group at least, a trendsetter and an authority on exciting new experiences.
Hospitality as a Service: Hiring and Training
Gordon Lamphere: Probably eighty percent of our audience is real estate investors and brokers, and one thing we’ve been moving toward is the idea that real estate, hospitality or residential or commercial, is becoming a service. Chick-fil-A, many years ago, reached out to hospitality groups to teach employees how to interact with customers like it’s a home. How do you train the boots-on-the-ground employee to create that warm experience when the customer rolls in at two in the morning?
Ben Wolff: I can tell you how we do it today, and we’re constantly trying to improve here. We don’t come from five-star, Michelin-rated hospitality, so we’re getting coaching and bringing in hospitality consultants to learn what those folks know, because there’s incredible knowledge in the top restaurants and hotels. How we think about it is: how do we communicate and share the vision and enroll people in it? How do we get the people we hire excited about innovating hospitality for the modern traveler, creating shareable experiences, and collaborating with guests instead of transacting? Because I share about this constantly, whether leads come through LinkedIn, Twitter, or the newsletter, or through a staffing agency or an Indeed post, they’ll look up the company, see the podcasts I’ve been on, and see whether their values align. They enroll themselves in the mission. That’s an advantage. Another piece is that we’ve considerably increased our salaries and budgets. We want a limited, very efficient staff, fewer people who are exceptional, and to get exceptional people, you pay more. We also do on-site housing, which lets us pull from a broader pool. If we offer a free place to stay on an inspiring property, a very competitive salary, and a compelling vision, then I believe you get a rock star. In the beginning, when I opened Onera, I wasn’t all over the internet talking about this, we didn’t have on-site housing, and we were trying to get people cheap. Hiring was extraordinarily hard. The company has come a long way, and now we’re seeing incredible dividends from investing in our people, communicating the vision broadly, and offering housing.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: A lot of lean-and-mean groups we’ve had on share that view of small teams with competitive salaries. We’re getting lean on time, so let’s go to the Final Four. Starting with the future: what’s changed most about the hospitality industry, and where is it going?
Ben Wolff: Hospitality and hotels specifically have been democratized. Airbnb is a big reason. It’s allowed a whole wave of innovators and entrepreneurs to get into hosting who otherwise never would have, and that’s led to a different way of thinking that pushes the bounds of historical wisdom in hospitality real estate, which was never true but was never challenged. That’s exciting, and it’s happening now. Those same people will create some of the most compelling hotel brands going forward, brands with insatiable customer loyalty and excitement like you see for Apple, or for relentlessly customer-focused brands like Amazon. Today you don’t see that loyalty to big hotel brands. The loyalty is there because of points and perks, not because anyone’s enrolled in the mission of Marriott or Hilton. That’s going to change. And I believe Instagram will be the biggest OTA by 2030. It’s a much more enjoyable, euphoric experience for discovering a destination or a place to stay than bargain shopping on Booking.com or Airbnb. You can see the property from all angles with video and lifestyle shoots showing people interacting with the space, get a tidbit from the founder that helps you connect. It’s not twenty static photos and a uniform description, which is where a lot of platforms are heading.
Gordon Lamphere: Now a step back in time. When you were starting in hospitality, what one tip would you have given yourself?
Ben Wolff: Two things come to mind. Don’t skimp, and you can’t outsource your problems. I tried to outsource capital raising earlier in my career because I didn’t enjoy it, and come to find out, the CEO has to do that. I’ve learned I’m better at it than bringing someone else in, because I understand the business at its core, can handle objections, and have a passion and insight nobody else would. Same with social media: we tried an agency, and they didn’t care the way we do or look at it from an owner’s standpoint. On not skimping: I tried to cut corners and be cheap here and there to lower costs or improve margins, and it inevitably comes back to bite. China was a prime example. I could have leveled up in short-term rentals sooner if I hadn’t been cheap early on, built a brand sooner, and had better-performing properties. The last five to ten percent of spend on final design and amenities has the highest returns of the whole project. Why buy the land, pour the pad, get the plans, do the utilities, and then stop at the ninety percent mark and do half the revenue you’d do with that last bit of investment? We embody that in all ways now, including hiring. You can’t skimp on hiring either. We have a robust process and hire slowly to get good people. I don’t hire just to fill a hole; that’s short-sighted. If I’d internalized those things earlier, I’d have had success earlier.
Gordon Lamphere: In office and multi-tenant industrial, we say there are three places you can take an L: lobby, landscaping, and the lot. Where are the ultimate value-adds in that last ten or fifteen percent?
Ben Wolff: It’s the things guests see, feel, touch, and smell, the things that show up in videography and photography, the first things they see when they enter. We spend quite a bit on finishes and on furniture, a lot more than I used to, and you can see the difference. So many short-term operators buy the same stuff, even West Elm, which isn’t cheap but is a cookie-cutter way of delivering, when you could spend a bit more on custom furniture that often has a better warranty and lasts longer. On architecture and design, those decisions are up front, but it’s deciding, yes, we’re going to cantilever the hot tub twenty-five feet in the air and spend thirty grand more on structural steel, because we’ll be the only game in town with that shot. That’s where “maybe this is risky” comes into play, but it’s actually the competitive moat mitigating risk: nobody else is doing it, nobody else can get that shot, and you’re the only game in town.
Gordon Lamphere: Is there a book our listeners should read, ideally on hospitality, but it could be life in general?
Ben Wolff: I have to admit I mostly listen to podcasts. But one book I read as a teenager and again in my twenties, and still remember a lot from, is How to Win Friends and Influence People. My dad gave it to me as a kid. It helps in any realm of business and life, and hospitality especially. How do you make people feel special and important? That’s as important in hospitality as in any business, if not more.
Gordon Lamphere: I’m never going to sleep on Dale Carnegie. The most important question, and the whole reason for the podcast: who should come on next?
Ben Wolff: Have you had Isaac on? He’s a good buddy of mine.
Gordon Lamphere: We haven’t, and we should. Tell us about Isaac.
Ben Wolff: Isaac French founded Live Oak Lake, an experiential landscape hotel in Waco. We’re good buddies, and I view him as a contemporary and a colleague in experiential hospitality. He hosted my wife and me for our anniversary, and we’ve hosted him and his wife. He has a unique perspective. We agree on a lot, but he thinks certain things are more important than I do, and vice versa. He’d be valuable for hospitality real estate folks.
Gordon Lamphere: We’d love to have him on. One final question: what’s the best way for someone listening to reach you?
Ben Wolff: I’m very active on LinkedIn, Ben Wolff with two F’s, and on Twitter at @uniquestaysguy, which is where I think Gordon found me. In either place you can sign up for my newsletter. I share on this stuff weekly, and we post additional insights and experiences daily.
Gordon Lamphere: Thank you so much for hopping on today.
Ben Wolff: Thanks, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Ben. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a follow, and a review. All your interactions matter and help us get great guests. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
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