Life House launches management company for independents

The COVID-19 downturn is spurring hotel brand and management company Life House to expand its offerings with the launch of Life Hospitality. The new management company is focused on maximizing hotel profitability for independent hotels through tech-powered cost reductions and revenue enhancements, without a renovation or rebranding.

To support owners in particular need of support following COVID-19 impact, Life Hospitality is offering no transition fees and no management fees until 2021.

According to Bryan Dunn, head of growth, Life House has received strong interest from owners of independent hotels seeking to benefit from the company’s lean, tech-enabled approach to management in order to protect their bottom line.

“While we have successfully provided this service to owners in numerous instances over the past couple of years, we have not formally communicated this competency to the broader market,” he said. “At a moment when independent hotel owners are experiencing unprecedented pain, we're fortunate to be well-capitalized and we're eager to leverage our strong position to lend a helping hand—which is why we have offered to waive fees until the market begins to meaningfully recover in 2021.”

Life House’s current portfolio encompasses 13 projects with a variety of food-and-beverage outlets. The company will continue to expand Life House alongside growing its portfolio of independent hotels in collaboration with owners across the country.

“We anticipate certain independent hotel owners may opt to rebrand into a Life House as market conditions and access to financing improve, in which context we are well-positioned to support given our in-house interior design and real estate development capability,” according to Dunn. “However, this would be at ownership's sole and exclusive option, and we would have no expectation that this outcome would occur.” 

The company plans to continue hiring staff at the corporate level as its managed pipeline of both independent and Life House-branded hotels continues to grow across the U.S., and soon beyond, Dunn said.

Life House was founded by luxury boutique hotel veterans in 2017 and has rebuilt the hotel technology stack to create a completely new operational model that allows for a robust, lean operation to hotel owners. The company has already taken over seven hotels to date and to ensure quality control will initially only be selecting only 30 more hotels to partner with this year.

“There are many independent hotel owners out there who have created great independent hotel concepts but haven’t sorted out the increasingly complicated business of operating them,” said founder/CEO Rami Zeidan. “Strong hotel revenue growth over the last several years has masked the underlying operational challenges that have become more apparent with Covid-19.”

The announcement comes a few months following the company closing a $30M Series B financing round.

Life Hospitality leverages a proprietary technology stack that enables its teams to efficiently drive incremental revenue and risk-free cost savings to the bottom line.

Life Hospitality has fully automated and centralized functions like financial accounting & reporting, pricing & revenue management, and digital marketing, allowing for advanced operations and minimized costs without diluting guest experience. Life Hospitality is able to take over existing hotels in as little as one week and train staff on its intuitive software in a single day, materially decreasing transition costs and preopening costs for owners.