There is this place in the mountains we go where this guy has an old general store that is located next to a mountain stream. You can go out on the back platform and buy corn to feed the fish. When you throw the corn in the water, there must be five dozen big fish that all go after the food at the same time and create a feeding frenzy.

Today in the financial markets, it is sort of like that. For the period from late January to late April 2018, most all the hospitality publicly traded stocks were down in value and impacted the acquisition markets in a negative way. Over the past five weeks, most of the same stocks have rebounded in valuation causing the publicly traded companies to look again for investments. I just attended the New York Investment conference where there were more groups looking for investments, than I have seen since summer of 2007. The reason I bring this up is because the outlook in summer of 2007 looked very favorable and then the market crash began in October 2007 when the secondary debt markets began to falter. The US economy is the strongest in what could be decades and the market for single family housing all the way up the ladder to commercial real estate seems to be at valuation levels unlike anything I have ever seen.

Life and human nature are funny things to try to understand when it comes to money. One would think that a seller would jump at the chance to transact when things are good but this assumption is often incorrect. I saw this during the last market cycle where sellers instead of transacting, decided to hold out for every dollar and many of these same clients missed the window. I heard a smart guy (Jack ward) say once that “many times, the best time to sell is when it hurts the most.” He was speaking of a seller fighting the temptation of waiting for the last dollar.

I think today while the market is hot, Jack’s advice would be prudent to follow. I have seen people sell a little too early and I have seen people try to sell too late. In this regard, early is much much better than being late. KT