COPLEY, OH—After a decade in the hotel business, Radius Hospitality is focusing on increasing its third-party management work.
“We continue to look to grow that side of it,” said Scott Yaeger, a founding principal with the company, which currently third-party manages three hotels. “We look for quality and, in our company, integrity is important to us. We look for that right type of relationship to be able to go in and do a great job for somebody. That is how we started back in 2008. We slowly grew and acquired and built some hotels, and have been very fortunate and very successful in what we have been able to get done; we continue to grow today, and our focus down the road will obviously be our own developments and/or purchases as we move forward, and to grow the third-party side of our business as well.”
In addition to the three properties it manages for others, the company also owns and operates nine of its own, with one property currently under construction and another under development. Many of the properties are located in its home state of Ohio, with others in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Jersey (where the company has a second office). Radius Hospitality is primarily affiliated with Marriott, IHG and Choice brands in the upscale, upper-midscale and extended-stay segments.
Hospitality has always been a part of Yaeger’s career, but not hotel management—he started in the business as a chef. “I never thought I would get on the hotel side of the business,” he said. “An opportunity came along, and I started to move in that direction and just never looked back.”
After gathering experience at full-service and select-service properties while at another management company, he teamed up with Rupen Patel to start Radius. “He was just getting into the hotel side of the world,” said Yaeger. “He purchased a few hotels and we ended up developing a relationship. We partnered, and developed Radius in 2008. We started with a couple of hotels and kept building. In the beginning, all we really did was anything we owned, we managed.”
As the company began to grow and develop, they were approached by other hotel owners about managing their properties. “We really started down the third-party route and now, we are pretty particular about who we work with,” he said. “We look at our business through a certain set of glasses and really want to do things right.”
Yaeger said that integrity is the cornerstone of their business. “When we started Radius, I had worked for companies before that had done third-party work and they really didn’t look at those owners as owners; they really looked at them as ‘what does that represent to me in fees every month?’ That bothered me,” he said. “You have someone who owns a building—and I am not saying we didn’t try to go a good job—but it was just the way it was looked at.”
He continued, “When we started this, I said, ‘If we are going to do this, I just want to make sure we do it right.’ I realize that it is not a black-and-white world, but I don’t live in the gray side of the world very well. If we are going to take on something, we are going to give it our all and do everything we can to make sure that whether it is a property we own or a property someone else owns, we are running it the same way. We want the person who owns that property, even though we don’t have investment in it, to do just as well as we would do in our own properties. That is what began our process.”
While the company is putting a focus on its third-party management efforts, it will continue to develop its own properties and is looking to grow the geographic areas in which it operates. “We are looking at a project down in Florida,” he said. “From Denver east, there is really not a place that we wouldn’t look to continue to expand. We started in Ohio and just spread from there. We will continue to do that. Our business is going to grow in both phases—our development won’t stop and our acquisition won’t stop. But with a focused effort on the third-party, we’ll continue to grow that side.” HB