The first time Tracy Prigmore tried to buy a hotel, she didn't close the deal.
It was 2008, and as an independent investor, she couldn’t get the financing she needed to secure a Comfort Inn in her hometown. When the SBA declined her loan, “that kind of devastated me, because I had followed the book, taken the classes, and done everything I thought was right. I lost $40,000, which was a lot of money for me at the time.”
She didn’t attempt to buy a hotel again for six years.
Fifteen years later, she’s now the founder of Tysons, Virginia-based real estate investment and development firm TLT Solutions and runs She Has a Deal, a signature program she launched in 2019 that educates, mentors and guides first-time female investors through the process of purchasing a hotel property. She also hosts an annual competition, where at the end of Prigmore’s seven-month master class on hotel investing using her step-by-step road map, participants pitch a hotel deal to industry executives for a chance to win $50,000 in deal equity.
Prigmore’s goal: to raise the next generation of female hoteliers, bridge the gaps that make hotel investing unattainable for women, and provide aspiring commercial real estate investors with the tools to succeed that weren’t available to her.
“Our mission is to create new pathways to hotel ownership and development for women. Increasing the number of women owning and developing hotels is inherent in that, but I say ‘new pathways’ because the way others have gotten there in the past is not necessarily how we're going to get there now,” Prigmore told LoopNet. “So let’s identify our barriers and take them down.”
From Side Investor to Full-Time Owner
Prigmore runs her own investment firm today, but she didn’t start in the commercial business. In her early 20s, the self-made hotelier was working full-time in healthcare and was inspired to start investing in real estate as a way to build wealth after reading the book "Rich Dad Poor Dad."
“I had a job that I hated, so I read into what the book was saying about financial independence. I didn’t have a lot of money, but grabbed on to the idea to just start where you are,” she said. She bought a two-bed, two-bath condo that needed a little fixing up and rented it out. “I was like, oh, this works. I see what he’s talking about. So I caught the bug.”
She got her real estate license so she could represent herself and started buying condos and single-family homes on the side as rental properties. “But I never thought commercial property was in my reach,” she said. “I thought only really rich people owned hotels.”
Six years after her first attempt at a hotel purchase didn’t come to fruition, she still couldn’t shake the idea of expanding her portfolio into commercial assets.
“I was still working my day job in healthcare, I’d gotten married and started a family, and was still investing in single-family homes, but hotels were still in the back of my mind,” she said. “I decided it was time to ‘put up or shut up’ as my mom used to say.”
Prigmore invested in her first hotel deal through a limited partnership, meaning investors each contribute funds to collectively purchase an asset. It’s the financial model her firm TLT Solutions currently uses for its residential, multifamily and hospitality acquisitions.
“That [first] deal ended up being a disaster,” she said. “When I look back, I took a lot of risks! There were things I wasn’t clear on or didn’t know where to get the answer.”
Throughout her early career, as she tried to find her way in the hospitality industry, Prigmore still felt lost about many aspects of commercial property ownership, despite actively seeking out guidance and experience by studying, taking courses, regularly attending conferences and networking. All of these were helpful, she said, but still left her wondering where to begin. “You have people up there [at conferences] talking about their billion-dollar portfolio, but how does someone get into investing to build that for themselves?” she said. “You come away knowing everything about the brands, but you still don’t know how to buy a hotel.”
Made for Women, By Women
She’d also noticed something significant missing from the hospitality sector: women.
While women make up 70% of the tourism and hospitality workforce, they only make up 10% of hotel development roles, according to data from Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.
“I would go to a lot of conferences to meet people and network, and rarely did I meet female owners. I would meet female franchisers, designers and architects, but when I said I wanted to be an owner, I was met with skepticism,” Prigmore said. “People would ask where my money was coming from.”
The scarcity of women in the industry Prigmore could relate to left her feeling like she couldn’t get the information, guidance, or mentorship she needed to succeed in a hotel investment career.
So, channeling her own experiences and envisioning the road map she wishes she’d had, Prigmore drafted a blueprint that addressed the industry gaps, roadblocks and needs of women in the male-dominated industry, including representation, closely guarded best practices and access to capital.
“What I needed was education. I’d talk to men at these events who would say, ‘Oh you just do this or that, it’s simple,’ and I was like, no it’s not. You don’t just buy a hotel like you buy a house, and I’m not jumping into these endeavors with all my money if I don’t understand where it’s going," she said. "So I wanted to make it easier for other women who were interested in getting into hotel investing, and wanted them to have everything that I wish I had known before I started, everything I’ve learned along the way, and everything I continue to learn.”
It was the inception of She Has a Deal, which Prigmore launched in 2019.
The signature She Has a Deal program is broken down into three major segments: education, mentorship and an annual hotel pitch competition.
The educational component lets participants access the self-education master class that guides them through Prigmore’s exclusive nine stages of hotel investment road map. “I thought women could benefit from learning along our framework,” Prigmore said.
She Has a Deal’s intro course — including six-month access to the educational resources and six virtual coaching sessions with Prigmore — costs $4,999, while the 12-month access with 14 coaching sessions runs students $16,500.
She emphasized that one of the most important keys to success in investing is knowing how to tackle every aspect of a deal yourself, and understanding what each stage means. “You have to learn how to underwrite your deal. Do not abdicate this to someone else or be afraid of numbers, because they are just simple math. You need to be the one in those documents because no one cares more about your money than you do.”
The education component also includes “education that you can’t get in a book,” Prigmore said. Feeling like best practices and tricks of the trade were closely guarded by industry veterans, she wanted to provide an educational resource that reflected what one would learn from a mentor, “someone who has made mistakes, has had successes, and cares about your successes. Someone who will open up and tell you everything you need to know, like the little secrets you’re not even supposed to know to get ahead, and line things up for you so that your journey is smoother and more direct. That's what our education is designed to do,” she said.
When provided with the right resources, Prigmore said she wants to take novice investors from “unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent. You want to get to a certain level of investment competency, but you are not ever going to know everything. You have some areas you're competent in and others you're incompetent in, but if you know you're incompetent you’ll reach out and get the resources you need,” she explained.
Prigmore didn’t want to be the only voice in the program, so she reached out to other women in the industry who had helped her along the way to join her “SHaD Squad” and serve as “luminaries,” — her term for experienced industry players that can “shed light on aspects of the hotel ownership journey” — and teach along through the nine-stage course. “I wanted them to share their knowledge and wisdom with the women as a supplement to the core education.”
The notion feeds into She Has a Deal’s second pillar of mentorship. She Has a Deal is about “women supporting women,” Prigmore said. “There's nothing like a good peer group you can call on when you’re having a challenge or a problem. I wanted She Has a Deal to be that place to connect with like-minded women who were on the journey.”
Pitching Her Deal
The third piece, and one of Prigmore’s innovative “pathways,” is the She Has a Deal annual Pitch competition, a Shark Tank-style competition in which participants learn how to underwrite a hotel deal of their choice over a seven-month course, and then pitch it to a board that includes executives from top hotel brands for the chance to win $50,000 for their investment.
The pitch competition is divided into two groups, Today’s Woman and Early Careerist, both of which require an application into the program. Today’s Woman participants may already have hospitality or commercial real estate experience and are ready to execute a hotel deal, they just need some additional resources. Winners are expected to raise capital and close the deal they pitched. The Early Careerist group is for current college students or recent graduates interested in learning about hotel investment, and will have their winnings invested in TLT’s She Has a Deal Prosperity fund for future equity.
The winnings for both tracks are held in escrow, but Prigmore said that what’s more important than the earnings is what participants learn through the pitch process and the early exposure to the hotel industry, especially in the case of the Early Careerists, who aren’t expected to close a deal at that point in their career.
“You obviously can’t buy a hotel for $50,000, that’s just some working capital to get started and build on for the future. But if we just hand someone $50,000, they probably won’t ever close a deal and then we aren’t moving the needle,” Prigmore said. “We hold the winnings in escrow because, by default of being in the fund, the winner is set up to be a hotel owner. They're a limited partner with rights and responsibilities, and passive income. It’s just a percentage that they own, but the program gets them in the right mindset to learn how to buy a hotel, go through the documents, and understand what they are doing.”
TLT Solutions ratified its first contract for a deal pitched by a participant in the 2023 Today’s Woman competition and is currently raising capital for the deal. It needs to raise $6 million to close on the asset.
More Work To Be Done
Prigmore may be moving the needle with her organization’s efforts, but the path for women isn’t completely clear. Just as it was an initial insurmountable hurdle for her in her first deal, Prigmore said the biggest challenge facing aspiring young female hotel owners is lack of capital and access to financing.
“We need to unleash more capital and take out some of the friction between those who have it and those of us who need it. And that's a journey,” she said. TLT created a fund that’s used specifically to invest in women-led projects, and while individual investors have contributed to the pot, she said getting institutional funding is still a work in progress. “To even get into these deals, you need a substantial amount of equity before you even go out and raise funds, to put it under contract, to do your due diligence, etc. So, if you don't have access to the cash, then you’re never getting into the game. So we want to solve that hurdle of liquidity.”
At the crux of She Has a Deal’s mission is the belief that when women are given the opportunity, resources, capital and education, they will excel in hotel ownership, Prigmore said.
“Women would nail it if they had more access. Wyndham Resorts has preliminary data from its Women Own the Room program that shows women-owned hotels have greater RevPAR [revenue per available room]. But if we don't create programs or services that allow entry into the field, then it’ll take decades before we get to the level where the numbers can shift,” she said. “I wanted to start exposing young women early because this generation believes they can do anything. There are no barriers or borders for them, so I thought if they were exposed early and learned what it takes, then their whole career could change.”