Our Approach

Location, location, location - it may have worked yesterday but real estate today is about business strategy, capital structure, implementation, and yes, location. Watermark employs a value added approach to investing, targeting opportunities that can benefit from the unique strategic, operational and capital markets capabilities brought to bear by our team as well as our culture of focused execution.

We have invested both solely, operating the acquired assets, and in partnership with real estate operators uniquely suited to the investments. Consistent with Watermark's investment style over many years, Carey Watermark Investors is a capital provider that expects to make investments through joint ventures with qualified owners and operators.

We focus our investment activities on hotels and resorts; resort residential products; recreational uses; and new-urbanism and mixed-use projects. While active in other sectors, over the course of almost 30 years our leadership has been recognized for its lodging-related investment activities and for being early trendsetters in value creation strategies ranging from the introduction of spas as part of integrated resort offerings, to operations outsourcing and the development of profitable new staffing techniques. Our team has also been early at employing similarly creative strategies in other real estate sectors including senior living. Importantly, we believe that we were among the earliest to capitalize on emerging trends over the course of multiple real estate cycles.

Target investments generally exhibit the following themes:

intrinsic barriers to entry such as legislated and natural growth limitations and environmental restrictions;
markets and assets with the potential to attract a diversity of demand as opposed to narrow customer bases;
scarcity value resulting from unique property characteristics, reputation, positioning or clientele;
assets that provide internal value-added opportunities as opposed to those where returns are predicated upon market growth or recovery; and
complex situations that offer multiple value creation opportunities.