09/01/2026
There is an 11 story Holiday Inn on the edge of downtown Denver. Atrium lobby. A balcony on every one of its 310 rooms. Three underground racquetball courts.
It sat next to Stapleton Airport until Denver built a new airport further out and took the demand with it. A hotel whose reason for existing moved away.
Dr. Alex Cartwright bought it for a little under $30,000 a door. Apartments down the street trade in the mid to upper $200s.
That spread is his entire business. His firm buys what he calls end-of-life hotels, rezones them before closing, and delivers apartments. The infrastructure is already there. Individual bathrooms, individual HVAC, front doors, parking, soundproofing between the walls because the building was designed for strangers to sleep near each other.
He spent ten years as an economics professor before this, and the reason he left is the part of the conversation I keep thinking about. More than half of rent-burdened Americans earn between $45,000 and $75,000 a year. Not people on assistance. People with jobs.
He takes residents paying $1,600 to $2,000 a month by the week at a run-down hotel and leases them a renovated unit for around $1,000. No taxpayer money involved.
We get into the buy box, what the renovation actually costs per unit, how lenders underwrite it off stabilized value the same way they underwrite a flip off ARV, and what cities are really afraid of when you ask for the rezone.
Dr. Alex Cartwright is the founder of HotelSHIFT Capital.
Link in bio.
