265: Break Room Surprise
Damon Lawrence caught the hotel bug at the front desk while he was a student at Howard University, and he co-founded Homage Hospitality to celebrate Black culture through boutique hotel ownership. After the pandemic wrecked his deal pipeline, he moved into consulting and hotel capital markets brokerage, where weeks of spreadsheet-heavy underwriting pushed him to build Underwrote, an AI underwriting platform made just for hospitality real estate. Susan and Damon talk about tax credits, terminology tests, and too many hotels.
What You'll Learn
- Why watching Thompson Hotels’ founders live like rock stars sold Damon on ownership
- What his name spelled backwards says about his hotel dreams
- Why a million dollars impresses Silicon Valley but barely moves a hotel deal
- Why hotels are the hardest asset in commercial real estate to model
- What FF&E has to do with your property tax bill
- Why the industry guards information nobody is trying to steal
- How soft costs can supersize a historic tax credit package
- Why so many hotel deals only work with incentives, and whether they should happen at all
- What a tired Quality Inn in Fort Wayne can teach developers
Key takeaway: Hotel deals reward people who learn the language, model the details generic tools miss, and spot value in buildings everyone else has written off.