One advice, is that I think you owe it to yourself to find out about it either way. I mean, even though we didn't buy, going through the numbers and talking to different people did give us a clue into parts of how a hotel business works. It's really interesting. We just couldn't get the numbers to line up to give us a compeling reason to buy it only as an investment property. (We don't like florida, so we would never go there on a vacation).
The basic premise of how a condo-hotel works is that you own a room/suite in a hotel, but a management company runs all the collective rooms as a hotel, splitting the profits with each owner. Ok, well sort of. I'll get to that later.
The sales pitch as an investment is that because it is part of a hotel, you can rent the room out at a high hotel/room daily price. The price depends on how many stars the hotel is,amenities, etc similar to the price differential you see in a normal hotel. Sounds complicated to rent out your own room? The sales pitch will tell you don't worry, a management company will take care of that for you.
The thing that was a challenge for us was the condo-hotels have huge fees. There is the management fee, which is like an HOA fee. On top of that, if you want to rent your room/suite out, you typically must go through the management company running the hotel. They charge a percentage of the room rate. So for example, if they rent out your unit for $100/night at 10%, they collect $10 per night. On top of that, you have to share the costs that are common to running the hotel. So, this would be stuff like paying for maintanence on elevators, pools, common areas, free continental breakfasts that the hotel offers as a perk, hotel franchise fees, etc.
Now the other thing is that while techically, the management company is suppose to round-robin renting out all available rooms, there's no guarentee your room will be fairly rented out. In the ideal world, a hotel has 100% occupancy throughout the entire year. Unfortunately, that's not the case, so let's say more realistically the hotel has a 70% occupancy rate. Ideally, the 30% of the non-occupancy should be equally distributed to all rooms such that on average everyone has the same occupancy rate. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way. If you have a less desireable unit, people might not like your room as much as someone on the top floor, and hence your unit may be rented less than others. There's nothing about sharing "revenue". If your unit happens to rent less than others, the that's your problem. BUT, on the other side, you have to share the cost of the common things regardless of how your unit does. See why I said the revenue isn't always "equal"?
Also, I briefly mentioned about occupany rate. It's very important that you know how occupied that hotel will get. The price you can rent out will be largely set based on the hotel's "star" rating. IE: you generally can't ask the management company to rent your room out at whatever price you want. They must follow their guidelines. So the thing that will largely determine your profit or losses is the hotel's occupancy rate. We ran some numbers at a few units, and the numbers where such that in certain hotels you would break even at 75% occupancy, be slightly cash flow positive at close to 79%, etc, and that's assuming your cost estimates where correct. The problem is that it's really hard to predict what a hotel's occupancy rate will be if the hotel is new. And if the hotel is old, well it depends on lot of things such as the hotel franchise, And in general it depends on the dynamics of the tourism business where the hotel resides.
There are a couple of other minor things that is worth considering, that are less of issues. One is insurance. You can't get a traditional insurance policy on these condol-tels because they will be predominantly occupied by short term renters. Hence, insurance companies are less inclined to insure you because it poses a greater liability (IE more people can potentially sue you). Also, getting financing for something like this is more along the line of getting commerical financing. Also, should the time come for you to sell, they only people that are buying would be (1) people wanting a vacation home or (2) people who think it will make a good investment property. The issue with this is that if you can't make it to work as an investment, the person next in line won't either, because they really isn't anything he/she could do to make things more investment grade, except buying it at a lower price than what you paid for. and Also, you can't ever sell it to someone looking for a primary home because you aren't allowed to live there permanently.
Hence, why I draw some similarities to timeshares. The best deals from timeshares are buying them from others who just want to get out.
So in all, while it might be possible to actually be cash flow positive, we felt there were just to many variables that we didn't have control over to buy one as an investment. And if you take a step back. A hotel really should be owned and run by one entity to take advantage of all the economies of scale. By selling each unit to individuals and still centralizing management, I don't see how that would be better than one large entity with economies of scale.
If on the other hand, you wanted to buy a vacation home, but also wanted to recoop some of the cost, a condo-tel might make sense for you. But again, don't count on making money from it. Just like don't count on a timeshare allowing you to make money.
Also, what I found surprising was that a lot of people buying condo-tels in florida were folks from california who didn't yet own a primary home. When I asked them why they were spending money on a condo-tel in florida but not on their own primary residence, they said because they couldn't afford a primary home.
I found this to be quite strage. Because, i think it was pretty obvious that a condo-tel wasn't going to make that much money if at all. If you're already going to lose money on something, you might as well buy your own home overpriced, and find a few roommates to recoop some of the cost of owning. At least in the end, you get to live where your paying. But that's just me.
