How do you get from your vision to building a hotel in your community?
Jeremy Emmett, from Southern Lodging, answered this question when speaking on your community and the Hospitality industry during our second retail session on Day 2 of the 2023 #ECGEDSummit. Take a listen.
How do we do something like this? And the answer is. It really depends. What it takes is for for you guys and and ladies. To have a vision like the people with the sidewalk had the vision, you know, And to be able to, you know, understand if you build a sidewalk like that, you better have all your potholes on point. If somebody's gonna wonder why you didn't feel that before, you go 300 miles of sidewalk and you have to be able to hear that kind of input from the community as well. But if you have the stomach for it and you have that type of vision, then you could work, you know, with someone, not me, but like me, that has the experience to be able to put this project together all you need. Is a side and a preliminary determination of feasibility, and then the last part is probably the most important. Is. And this is gonna sound how to cheesy, but it's actually true. Open books and open minds. So people say, how are we going to get from our vision to the hotel being built? And the answer is. I don't know. Because it depends on what you're comfortable with. So there's several ways to do it. Tax abatements, there's Freeland, there's increasing the revenue of the hotel in some way. There's ways to build out the site for the developer. There's all kind of ways to do that. But for me to stand up here and say in your town, we should do this, in your town we should do, that is not how this works. So what we do, what we suggest, and this is probably the most important part of this is. Get someone who will say. These are my books. This is the feasibility study. This is what the hotel will make in revenue. This is what it will do, and this is the feasibility study that you contracted, it says that's what it will do. Then we get with the we we design and we talk about what it is we want. We want to break all the way up. We won't break for two, two floors. Do we want this level of wood treatment? What is it that we want? And then we say this is how much it's going to cost. And then we just have a conversation. And sometimes that conversation could take a year. We just always sit down and think through it and if you're willing to do something like that, you can. You can have something like. The other way you do it is we'll go back to my sidewalk for a second is you have to get creative. So if in your town we're building a hotel. And we come up short. Then we just remove all the lights and tell them we have seen different. That's it.
