From Software Developer to a Master in Hospitality with Matt Barge

When you're on rent, you want to stay locked in. It's a focus game. You need to be thinking, not grabbing.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian Osgood, your host, and welcome to another episode. I actually have a friend here today. I'm very excited to have him on, Mr. Matt Barge. This guy is actually a hospitality guy. Why is he on Multifamily Strategy? Well, you're about to find out, Matt. Welcome to the show, man.

Great to be here, Christian. Uh, yeah, excited to do this podcast with you.

I am very happy to have you here. Uh, Matt's a very interesting guy. When I first met him, he was actually reaching out with questions on, uh, what our course mentorship program looks like in multifamily strategy. As I got to know him in that process, um, he's like, well, you know, I was like, where do you live? He's like, oh, I'm kind of a nomad. I live, I live wherever. Um, you know, sometimes California, sometimes Texas. I do projects in both. I'm like, okay, um, what is your goal? And he's like, well, buying hospitality. I'm like, interesting. Uh, reaching out about multifamily, a multifamily mentorship, talking about hospitality, already interested. Um, so, uh, The Entrepreneurial Nomad, uh, hospitality boutique hotel master Matt is here with us. Matt, I always like to— we'll talk about where you're at. I gave a little hint to it. You do boutique hotels. We'll talk about them. I like to know everyone's starting point. Before you were in business, before you were an entrepreneur, before any of it, tell us a little bit about Matt's origin story.

For sure. So, I think I'm going to be described as a Monopoly kid. So, I'm really good at math, love math, and that was my favorite game growing up. Grew up in Southern California, went to school up north, and ended up coming out to Texas 10 years ago. I got offered a job out here and stayed. I like it here. I actually used to be a software developer. I wrote iPhone code for MoneyGram.

I was a pretty typical W-2 earner.

I play tennis. Enjoyed like a bit of traveling and things like that. Everything sort of changed when I bought my first house and I bought my first house in the Colony, which is actually— you're near there, you're going to be right next door. And at the time, that was 7 years ago. So there was very little development. Actually, I remember riding my bike, drove up with my bike and I rode around where they were going to build the new Toyota headquarters. And we're going to— I had heard they were going to build the Liberty Mutual headquarters and whatnot. I was kind of riding my bike around, getting the lay of the land. And I had, you know, so I bought there and a tennis buddy came over and it was just me living in that house. And he said, hey, you should put one of these spare bedrooms up on Airbnb. And I thought about it. I was like, ah, I don't know, I decided to try it out and it just took off. And before I knew it, I found myself opening another bedroom, another bedroom, another house, another house, bought another house, another house. I scaled it slowly. So I bought as a primary residence once per year, and I found that I really enjoyed the business. So that was starting small from a single bedroom. I learned how to market that bedroom. You know, good photo, good clean, you know, clean appearance, you know, nice photos. I was doing them initially with my iPhone, but then hired a photographer quickly to, you know, get nice photos done. I was picking out pillows at HomeGoods and just found that I really enjoyed kind of the design aspects. I had a little Roomba who would help me clean the bedroom. Take me 5 minutes, knock it out. Yeah. And so really started at the nuclear level and then just grew it piece by piece. I used my software developer background to slowly but surely build a lot of infrastructure to run that small portfolio. So that's kind of my origin story. I used to be a software developer and I use that today. Bought my first house and that's how I got started with real estate, just doing Airbnb by chance.

What I found is that the W-2 can only take you so far, and you've got out of the software thing. How much do you think someone realistically needs to make to not have a side hustle and actually, like Dave Ramsey method, save your way to wealth in today's economy? How much do you think someone would have to make to not have to do another side adventure?

This is a great question. So, I think you optimize to hit $100K. I feel like $100K we live in a skills world, which is you need skills. So before you even get to what the outcome of those skills are gonna be, how much income that is, or whether it's gonna be active or passive, I would focus on skills. So if you're out there and you're thinking, hey, how do I get to my next milestone, my next real estate milestone? I would start with skills. The skills translate to every opportunity. So whether that's, you know, photography skills or digital marketing skills or, you know, story, excuse me, storytelling skills, could be financial skills, spreadsheet. You're going to reuse those things the rest of your journey. And so I would start from a place of knowing yourself, getting to know yourself, and really ironing out what you're great at, what, what you can be best at, and then identifying skills are going to, you know, advance things you're naturally good at, things that you naturally enjoy.

And which skills did you develop in work, like in a job that you had? What skills did you develop the most that you feel moved you forward the most?

So in software development, it's all about reusability, which is when you create a class, you can reuse that class in all kinds of ways when you're developing software. That is this. And what in brass tacks, what that means and how it applies to my business is When I first onboarded my first client for property management, I realized that I needed a way to get all the information about their property to be able to manage it effectively. And so I didn't just meet with them and write down a bunch of things about their property. I first created a form that would allow them to, that would allow me to ask all the things about their property that I could fill that, they could fill that out. And then as I onboarded more and more properties, I kept adding to that form and kept reusing kind of like the, the genesis of that form, even for, even in other ways. So like I ended up having like a property features set within that and I would reuse that Say if I was doing a kind of a comp analysis on, okay, what's the next— what's a feature that I could add to my Airbnbs that would give me the best return? Well, I would check— I could use my Onwarder to check what are all the features that I could analyze and use as a list to then start analyzing. So all that to say that It's just big and small, that reusability mindset and application that you learn in software development is just so amazing. The other thing is with running a real estate business, you really need digital skills to stay organized, stay structured, and to sort of contain the business and using all these tools, whether that's analysis tools, data tools, marketing tools, video, I mean, the podcast, you need digital skills. So that's really helpful. When you're writing code, using all the tools is like a natural thing. So it's been a great thing for me.

When was it time to leave the job? When was it time to do like, you built enough business where you're like, okay, software development, you have a reasonable— we'll call it a reasonably high-paying job, stable job. When was it time to leave that?

So the year was 2020. It was September of 2020. And I was happy at MoneyGram. I was doing great. I was a team— I was the iOS lead developer. And I enjoyed my job, although what had happened was We were actually, the app was booming and we weren't getting more teammates on board. And simultaneously I was asked to become a technical manager and they wanted to prepare me for promotion, which is to say they wanted me to do the elevated job for 6 months, not pay me, for doing that job. And then I would start doing that job and I kind of doubted, you know, I might get like a 20% bump in pay. I had been matching my employment income for a full year up until that point. And so it was kind of a combination of things. It was tough to leave MoneyGram. So I do— I love writing code. It's really fun. It's really creative. But that it was just time to go.

That makes sense. I— the best banker I've ever worked with, I would let this guy manage all of my money. He is fantastic. His bank, after years of being like the guy, they offered him a promotion that would pay him a mighty $1.20 an hour more than he was making.

He—

I learned later he was making less than I pay some of my older, very mediocre employees who no longer work for me. I was paying some people in property management more than he was making as the most valuable person on my team being paid by the bank. That is the fastest way to lose people. I have found if your business is— don't align compensation with goals. I've seen this on both ends. I have tried to fix things by promoting people and giving them raises too early. And it changed their expectations of what they should be getting and they left and it failed because I over-rewarded. So I'm not saying just everyone deserves more money, give it to them. But the way that you compensate people and thank people and promote people is really important. If you want someone to do more work, you need to align compensation to that immediately. You're also gonna lose your Matts or I, I don't know if he wants to be named, but my, my banking buddy. You lose your very best people if you don't think, how does compensation make them feel? And if it doesn't make them feel loved, you're probably going to lose your best people. I've learned that in a short time in business. Um, and I do a lot of hiring and firing. I have to date still fired more people than I've hired because I do acquisitions. Um, but you, it's painful. When you have great people leave. When is it monetarily the right time to leave a job? Where were you at where you were like, I can leave this job and I'm still gonna be okay?

Yeah, I think like I had hit that matching my employment income in cash flow. So not revenue, but cash flow for a year. Once I hit it a year prior, I noticed it. You know, but there was no reason, you know, I could have left at that time. But I'm someone who I think by, by nature, in some ways I'm very open to risk. In some ways I'm a little bit risk-averse. And I felt it was prudent to keep on chugging and keep following this model that worked well for me so far. And then once I got kind of pushed towards, you know, towards leaving, when it made, you know, when push came to shove, that then I decided to go.

You mentioned property management. When you left, how much of your business was managing rentals and how many of it was like Airbnb, boutique hotel, that sort of thing? How much was it, I own property and that's bringing in money, and how much of it was, I own a service company and that's making money? What was the What did that look like?

Yeah, so all the properties that— so I— it was mostly properties that I owned. So any property that I've owned, I've always owned outright so far. So I haven't done any partnerships and I've just used my own money to grow my ownership business so far. I had been getting asked by people to run their properties well, so I had a small client business, but that really wasn't you know, materially a, you know, a big deal. And I also, I'd, I've done the arbitrage model twice, so I had experience with that model as well. So ownership, management, and arbitrage. And all the business I was doing was all within that Airbnb umbrella. So I've never done long-term rental management, never done it.

Okay, let's, let's touch on that really quick. You didn't do long-term. This is something that I did wrong, and this is going to tie in later in the podcast, so stay tuned. But one thing that I did wrong in the business— I talk about this all the time— I deviated from my business model long-term. I have long-term property management, long-term people. We do tons of renovation on entry-level housing. I did a project that did not fit that mold, and I regretted it. You said something that I think was very interesting. It's always been short-term. Have you done any projects that are not short-term?

No rentals.

None of your businesses are there. It's all vertically aligned, vertically integrated.

Yep.

And you manage rentals, you have software, and your whole skill set ties into short-term rentals. Yes. What do you own today?

Yes. So I'm actually inside City Place B&B. Which is a boutique hotel, 10-unit building in downtown Dallas. So I own this building and it's a building that I bought in September of '22. And when I bought the building, it was grossing less than $10,000 per month and we just hit $35,000 per month last month. Wow.

So that's phenomenal.

Yeah, it's Well, you know, hospitality done right has amazing cash flow, amazing cash flow upside. And so it was a, it was a building that, you know, needed some love. It was a 1960s build, no personality. And, you know, the interiors, you know, were actually— it had good bones but could need, you know, could need some love, deferred maintenance and whatnot. And we had a mural done on the front of the building, converted the front yard to a dog park, and renovated all 10 interiors. So yeah, I mean, it's been a fantastic project and really happy with the results. I own it outright. I own it myself. I'm the only owner. I have a note on it, but it's been a great case study and just want to do more. It's been great.

Amenities like dog parks. Everyone sees the personality thing like that. That is the thing that I think everyone markets online really heavy is like, oh, we took this one space, we made it look like something else. I'm super happy you're good at that. And that seems to be like the main success metric for the extra amenities. I saw Rob Albasola added a pickleball court to his place. You have a dog park in yours. How much do you think that affects your bookings and your revenue as opposed to anything else you do, those bonus features, how big of an impact does that have?

It's huge. So there's a competitive aspect that differentiation, especially in high— I think it's so important in every aspect, every asset class of real estate. I think it's— well, hospitality, there's a little more room, you know, there's a little bit more, um, kind of there's a little bit bigger space to differentiate. You got a little more options, right? And I think that, you know, whether that's like pools, hot tubs, you know, pickleball, you know, yeah, dog park, all kinds of things. You've got some, you know, kind of a lot of options there. It's also very marketing driven. Asset class. So not only having those features, but really showcasing them in great photos, great videos. We like to do a welcome video that prepares the guests, but, you know, as soon as they book, prepares them to arrive. And a great website. So you want to have great direct booking website. And so amongst a lot of other things, so I would say the other big branch within hospitality is operations. So you want to have really tight operations, and the yield from that is great reviews. So your first, your number one sales tool is photos. Second is reviews. And great operations create great reviews. People tell each other that it's a great place to stay. So you just got a lot of levers within hospitality. There are other things in the kind of underwriting ecosystem of hospitality, but you're absolutely right. Those, you know, the feature set and the amenities are huge.

No, my favorite thing about hospitality is— and there's not much because hospitality has not, uh, not been my favorite experience of all time. My skills are poorly aligned. There's one thing about it that I love though. Hospitality is uniquely competitive. Now, in multifamily, you have market price. You can get a little below market rent and you'll have less vacancy. You can push market rent if you own a ton of stuff like we did in Moses Lake. I have the management company. You have to build massive infrastructure, massive, to be able to compete in multifamily. In hospitality, every single project competes with every other project on its own, whether it's 1 room, 100 rooms. There is a competitive nature. One of my favorite quotes in business came from Matthew Barge. The only way to solve an overpayment is to outperform. Now, I had never heard that or thought about that when he brought that up because I'm working on the Robinhood where we dominated on terms of that contract. But then I realized we suck at multifamily and we overpaid for it, so we can't trade it to the next person. I was like, "Well, the only way to outcompete is to fix overpayment, is to outperform." My initial instinct was like, "Oh, yeah. Wouldn't that be nice?" But then you think about this and you're like, This is uniquely a business where outperforming is a legitimate option. Yeah, you actually can out-market and out-deliver and demand a higher price by having a unique product, because multifamily, being the best cookie-cutter repeatable thing is where you make money. Hospitality is literally the opposite. This is why I suck at it. I'm geared towards replaceable parts, cost of renovation, efficiencies, time to completion. This is more of a like, how do you out-creative the people around you? Uh, which is, you note-takers out there, write that one down. That's a good one. I think that's like the key to hospitality because it's not even fixing an overpay. It's like, how do you win? Outperform. Everything is, what do I do in this thing to optimize the pictures, optimize the feel, optimize the experience, optimize the follow-up, optimize the Instagrammability. That's a word now. That is how you run this. Uh, every single one of those is something that me and my team is bad at. Matt, we're working on a project together. What are we working on?

Well, we're a team now, so we're gonna tackle this. Let's go, baby! We're gonna tackle this, this project together. So, um, yep, you're absolutely right. So Christian and I, uh, agreed to terms along with Cody on Robinhood. So I'm very fortunate to be, uh, sharing that I'll be taking over management of Robinhood, um, shortly. So we've already started onboarding And it is a property that has great potential, amazing potential against a waterfront location and really charming cabins. And what has happened is what we're going to do. So assets equals liabilities plus owner equity, right? What we need to do is just increase the asset value. How do we increase the asset value? We increase the NOI. How do we increase the NOI? We're going to drive more reservations by way of better marketing, you know, just, just. And that means better photos, more complete descriptions on more marketing channels. There's a whole, you know, when you go through the list of things, of ways to improve a property in hospitality, there's, there's kind of a hierarchy. So even starting with at the top is distribution, which is like, I'm not going to change a thing. I'm just going to list on more marketing channels. Second would be marketing, which is I'm going to pay for better photos, some better photography, get some drone photos done. Costs a little bit of money and a little bit of time and has an effect as well. And then you go down the, you know, adding extra paint or doing renovation or, you know, knocking it down to the studs. More, you know, more time, work, and money, more effort. And so Robinhood is already an amazing property. This is just a property that, you know, we need to, you know, just kind of capture it in its essence to make it more appetizing to guests. It already has a fan base. It already has an existing customer base. We want to retain all those people and we want to bring in new guests, and that is by way of Number one sales tool is great photos. So we've already gotten great photos done of the exteriors, and we have a little, you know, we got drone photos done, looks great. And now along with those things, you know, I'll be launching on Expedia and Booking.com. So that's going to add, it's not easy to do, but you know, you need to know kind of some intricacies about how to do that properly. But that's when you—

it's almost like you need a programmer or designer to get this done.

They're tough to work with. It's not you, trust me. I bet, you know, I was pulling my hair out getting used to working with those guys. But once you know kind of the tool, you know, the tips and tricks and kind of how to set it up right, we're going to get— we're going to knock that out and then we're going to set up just more. Sophisticated operations. And that means we're going to keep— we're going to be capturing more 5-star reviews, which is going to lead to more guests. And we're going to try to make operate— we're going to make operations more efficient. And that means things like internet-connected front door locks so that, you know, staff doesn't have to spend time, which is money, and time they could be spending doing other things to, you know, get the guests into their unit, to, you know, help them if they are having trouble getting in, things like that. So that way it's all automated, organized, and easy to check. We can even see the status of if a lock is locked, unlocked, when it was unlocked or locked. It's very secure. So there, there are a lot of things and it's going to be great. I'm thrilled to be working with you and, uh, We're a team, so you do have someone that, uh, knows hospitality on the team.

And this is, this is how you scale in business. And this is something that I've learned specifically doing this podcast. If you've watched some of the past episodes, uh, there have been multiple people who are in the, uh, 10-plus-figure-per-year range. The number one thing that they say to do to get from making a million a year to making $10 million And apparently it's pretty similar to the next breakpoint. Uh, one, you need to know yourself and have humility in that you can't do every role. You will get capped. I think most people who are like, I'm the solopreneur and I'm, I'm the head of everything. They usually seem to cap somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million a year. That's about as much as most people seem to be able to earn if they need to be the one. To do everything. You need to know yourself on like, I know what you're good at and know where you're weak at and your ability to insert people into your universe beneficially for everyone consistently is how you expand. You take your pieces and you go, this is where we're weak. You can spend all of your time trying to grow your weaknesses, or you can go, I'm gonna do the things that I am best at and I'm going to put people who are best at the things that I'm weak at in those positions. Doesn't mean you don't work on your stuff, but it does mean that you don't spend a majority of your time on the things that you suck at. This is the second largest purchase I've ever been a part of. And it's the thing that as a team, we're the worst at, like across the board, Cody, Christian, my wife, Dani, she does an amazing job helping out and she hates it. We're putting on the right people. In the team. This is something I've learned from the Multifamily Strategy Podcast. A lot of this has been just connecting with other owners who have done the thing that I want to do. All of them across the board, they're like, okay, you know what you need to do? Stop operating multifamily— or sorry, hospitality. Keep operating multifamily. This is a way for— do it to do what we do best. Putting people in place for this project, I'm all in. Moving capital, I'm good at that. Marketing. I'm sure Matt and I are gonna work together on a lot of marketing for this, cuz I'm actually a fairly decent marketer, I think. But take your strengths and focus on those and the things that you're not, find the people in your universe. Matt is the person in my universe who's going to help us with this project. We're super excited for it. Um, and super fun to have you here on the pod. So I have two final questions for you. The questions we asked every time. First of all, We just talked a ton about why I need your strengths. What is the thing that you're the best in the world at? What is the thing unique to Matt Barge? Where it's like, this is the thing that Matt is amazing at. And how has it helped you grow your business?

I'm great at underwriting. I know a deal when I see one. So right now I have a, I have a hotel under contract for $275,000. It's a 20-unit hotel., and it appraised for $850,000 ARV. My underwriting was actually, I underwrote it at a million. I thought it could hit a million. It actually came out about $925,000, and I expected the appraiser to come a little bit under that. So, you know, that was a great kind of confirmation of, you know, of my underwriting skills. And I think that's really the heart of real estate and hospitality. And it's something that I'm really interested in sharing in a new program that I'm offering called Hosts to Hotels. So this is a program that's, you know, that is built to transform people from zero to hero, from if you have one Airbnb, you have no Airbnbs, but you want to get involved in that, or you got a portfolio already, transform them to hotels. And so you're going to get my own underwriting model that I built over time. And this is something that I've already gone through and kind of churned out all the learning lessons. And I'm really here to share and transform you via the, you know, the lessons that I've had on how to, how to find these properties, how to underwrite them, how to finance them, how to operate them, all those things. And so I really pride myself on being able to see a deal. I think that in real estate you make your money when you buy. There's kind of only so much you can do once you've already bought. There are a lot of things, but, you know, it's— you really want to make your money when you buy. So That's what I'm best at, and that's what I'll be sharing in my program.

I'm excited to work on that as well. The money is in the deal day one. And there are certain things you can do to lower expenses, raise income, but your upside is immediately capped. What you can accomplish is capped by the deal that you do on the front end. Yep. You can only do so much to a property, and you can only get so much value. The buy is everything. Where is that hotel at, by the way, that one that you're under contract for?

Dilly, Texas, like dilly dilly. So that's fun. Yeah, it's a highway hotel. It's 20 units. It's closed. It sat on the market for over 2 years. Actually got a little bit of water damage and the sellers just decided to put up— they had been sitting vacant for a long time. But I knew once I saw it, I know this product. I know this is gold. It had been passed over by plenty of people. But, you know, when you have, you know, instincts helps a lot and then be able to plug into an underwriting model and, you know, you can see right away whether, you know, whether it's a great deal or not. I could see right away, oh yeah, this is, this is a winner right here. And turns out it was just, it's just an ugly duckling just waiting for some Love and attention.

There we go. Doing some hotel conversions to multifamily as we speak. Same thing as a beat-up hotel, half vacant. Owners lived on site at the hotel and they're like, we just want to move. It's like, okay, picked it up. A million six, big hotel, main road in a city that I own a lot of, a lot of real estate. Stabilized, worth $3 million. It's like $400,000 in rent. I'm like, okay, that's a seven-figure deal.

Awesome. Love it.

Love it. These things do sit in like the towns you want to invest. I think underutilized hotels, whether it be conversion to boutique hotel where you put a lot of personality in and you max the revenue or multifamily where you just stabilize the revenue, you fix it up, make it uniform, and you put long-term leases in it. Both of them are completely viable ways to fix these. And there are crappy motels in every town in America. These deals are— I think these are hot right now. I think a lot of these economically efficient buildings are a huge opportunity. I'm seeing more and more people get into this. Those are the two ways you take them. And what you're doing is phenomenal. I have had a few people in our mentorship program at Multifamily Strategy actually drive through Dallas and visit your hotel, and everyone is kind of like, dude, this This guy's legit.

Oh, thank you. Shoot. I wish I had been able to meet them. You gotta let me know when they're coming through.

Yeah, I know. There's, I think one of them took a, took a video with you, so I know one. I know you saw one of them. And then, uh, Caleb Hommel has swung by who is in, lives in Dallas.

I know that guy.

Oh, program. Yes, you do. Pickleball buddies now, I hear. Yeah. So fantastic having you on. Last question that I have for you. The highest stupid tax that you've had to pay learning this game. Because it is not free to get the experience. If you have stuff to teach people, it's because you've learned a thing, either monetarily or just personally. What's been the most expensive thing for you in learning how to play the boutique hotel and short-term rental space?

Yeah, so 2 years ago I sold my houses when the market was super hot. So I'll back up a little bit and to kind of give you a bit of background. So I saw the Airbnb market starting to soften. I started to kind of feel it and notice it about 3 years ago. And my first move was to differentiate, add more differentiation. So I actually, I ended up installing theater rooms in those Airbnbs, but it didn't really move the needle. And so I decided to start looking into multi-unit properties. And it was a long— it was actually on a tour that I met my first boutique hotel client. And, you know, so we advised on the— you know, they hired us, we advised on the renovation, hired a designer, been running it since, been doing great. And there really wasn't a lot of information out there on BiggerPockets or really anywhere. I remember I was posting threads about, hey, doing multi-unit short-term rental and, you know, what would, you know, how does this work? And there really wasn't a lot of information and videos and, you know, so-called experts out there to do it. And so I had seen firsthand managing the client's property. Oh, wow. This is, this is great. This is, this is a sure thing. And so I sold my houses. I just— 4 houses, small portfolio 2 years ago. And, you know, did great with that. And I rolled all of that into the new building, City Place, maybe the City Place, maybe the 10-unit. And I did a lot of things well. I made a couple of errors, and one, the first one was buying a building that did not truly allow lodging. So I researched the building beforehand, and zoning in Dallas is actually pretty difficult to confirm what exactly the allowed uses are. I did find that documentation beforehand and I received a list of allowed uses and lodging was listed because it's the location's right near the hospital. And so I thought, okay, I'm good. And it turned out that was not the case. So after I bought it and renovated it and we installed everything, we're killing it. On revenue. Yeah. Then the city implemented a ban on Airbnb and then I had to— that forced me to really confirm that research that I had done. And it turns out I was wrong. I was incorrect. And the zone, this zone, Plan Development 298, did not explicitly allow lodging. The zone across the street did. Yeah, so that was tough. That was error number 1. Error number 2 was paying retail. I found my deal off Zillow. I didn't know any better. I had messaged people on BiggerPockets. I had posted threads. I looked on YouTube. I truly tried to find out what the right way to do the idea was, could not find best practice. And so I went headfirst, you know, guns blazing into the project. And I did really well in some ways. I mean, there are some things that it's been an incredible learning experience and we've done great financially in terms of cash flow and everything like that. You know, also in terms of managing renovation, we actually got down by the time, time that we Between the time that we walked into the unit to when we had the unit renovated, furnished, and listed, we got down to 8 days. So that's how I met my contractor. He's amazing. And but paying retail is something that you don't want to do. You want to buy at a discount. And Zillow is not the correct source to finding a deal. And so that was a tough pill to swallow as well, because after the fact, I realized that, you know, at the time it's— we got $100,000 off asking. So I thought, hey, I'm doing a great job here. But, you know, the market has turned with, with rates and so forth. And I've also just learned a ton since executing that transaction.. And those are some— those are two things that I was, you know, hell-bent on correcting next time around. So this 28th hotel that I have under contract, it's a true hotel and it's zoned for lodging. And so ban can't touch me, you know, that regulation can't touch me and significantly underpaid. We're paying $13 a door, so heavily discounted. And that creates amazing margin. On the deal. And that means, you know, we can safely execute the deal, safely execute renovation. It's going to cash flow great. There's just a lot of— even if we're off or significantly off on our assumptions, and we use CoStar, which gives us the best data we can get, even if things don't turn out as well as we might hope, we're going to be in a great spot.

So, yes, that was the back end of my CoStar career. CoStar had all of the hotel data. That was right as I was leaving. They were integrating that. I can't remember the name of the company they bought, but it's like the STR rating and all this stuff that they have for hospitality that was like actively being rolled out when I left the company. That was a huge push for them 4 years ago where they're like, hey, we are going to be the premium hotel, hotel data site. So I'm happy for them that, that like everything they seem to touch, looks like they came in and dominated.

Yeah, I love CoStar. I love you guys. It's by far the best data. I know it's a tough pill to swallow. It is expensive. But I really feel it's, it's prudent to get it. The yield and the benefit, just the payoff that you get and you experience it right away when you're underwriting deals and you're getting all that really granular data, you know, when it was on the market, how much, when they took it off, what the demographics are, what the ADR is, what the RevPAR is. You know, what sales, what recent sales support getting. It's also getting all that information quickly, um, without having to like go all over the place. Cause when you're on rent, you want to stay locked in. It's all, it's a focus game. You need to be thinking, not grabbing. So, so yeah, it's, I love CoStar.

I'm happy to hear that. Yeah. It's very helpful, especially as you're expanding to new markets. It's like, It's just amazing to be able to do a quick snapshot, look through the software, understand, okay, here's where data says we are. And if you're in a tertiary market, it's probably not gonna be that helpful, but any major area, they're gonna have fantastic data. It's wonderful. I'm glad that— I'm glad it's working out for you. Well, this has been another episode of Multifamily Strategy. This is Matt Barge. Matt, where do people find you if they are looking for you online? They want to learn your course, they want to see your content. Now, where would one find you?

So you can hit me up on Instagram at The Matt Barge. I'm also at mattbarge.com, and you can look up my hotels program at host2hotels.com. That teaches you how to do what I do on hotels.

Fantastic. Links will be below wherever you're listening to this. We appreciate you, everyone. We will see you on the next episode.