The Law of Scaling: From Lawyer to STRs to Full-Service Hotels with Diya Lui - Episode #220

Diya Lui is a highly accomplished Harvard-educated lawyer who has made a name for herself in the hotel industry. With years of legal experience, Diya brings a unique combination of legal and technical expertise to the field, allowing her to analyze hotel deals with a level of detail and insight unmatched by others. Her background, which includes engineering, has given her a unique perspective on the business and the ability to identify hidden opportunities, particularly behind old run-down hotel operations. She saw that the industry severely lacked an expert operator with digital marketing and operations savvy, and Diya jumped at that chance right away. With a portfolio that includes a dozen short term rentals and three hotels, totaling 90 units, Diya has demonstrated her ability to identify and secure lucrative investment opportunities. Diya’s experience is diverse and deep, from short term rentals analysis to full-service hotels, where she specialized in improving old mom and pop operations to modern hotels with impressive margins. Most recently, Diya has added another impressive property to her portfolio, with a 76-unit hotel under contract. She just keeps going! Diya has built herself a lifestyle of traveling while analyzing hotel deals. Today, she shares her vast knowledge in the hotelier industry, with a level of high analytics and experience that has never been available before. Diya believes that her mastermind will open the opportunity for entrepreneurs to break into the hotel industry without a fancy degree or being born into a luxury hotelier family. She’s exactly the kind of trail-blazing, data-driven practitioner that we love having here in the lab. Experiment Nation, you’re in for a treat! You’ve never seen or heard hotelier and short term rental analysis like this before. Let’s build. HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EPISODE: 27:58 Diya breaks down what it takes to jump into commercial multi-unit rentals 36:23 What high level hotelier analysis looks like KEEPING IT REAL: 05:43 Diya’s elevator pitch 07:41 Analyzing deals and stay-in preference 12:32 From lawyering to real estate 17:14 Diya’s hotelier zone of genius 22:03 How Diya got into STR space 24:05 Is STR uptrending right now? 26:41 Diya’s property portfolio 27:58 Making the jump to multi-unit rentals 33:41 Hotel loans and licenses 39:00 Hotel loan vs Asset-based commercial loan 41:56 Breaking into the hotel niche 43:46 Hotel franchising mastermind 47:17 Multi-family vs Hotels 49:28 Profit margins when improving hotel operations 54:25 $650k to $1.2M in under a year 01:01:09 Exit vs acquisition 01:07:07 Diya’s BIG vision 01:09:42 Where to find Diya NOTABLE QUOTE: 46:04 “You have to have worked your way up or you’re born into being a hotelier which is why I am trying to revolutionize this industry.  – Diya Lui CONNECTING WITH THE GUEST Website:  https://diyaliu.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/diyaesq/ Get Your Airbnb Millionaire Blueprint: https://experimentrealestate.com/#blueprint #str #hospitality #fullservicehotel