ABSTRACT
The asset manager may comprise an individual or a team of people, either in the direct employment of the entity making the investment or as part of an organization that contracts with the
investor to provide these specialist services. This is a role which is effectively as old as that of managing hotels and restaurants, but it has only emerged as a specialist function in the last two or three decades. The asset manager role has been driven by three main factors:
1 The increasing value of the property asset brought about by hospitality properties becoming larger and more complex structures requiring greater amounts of capital and being much more substantial businesses requiring integrated on-property operations
2 The increasing trend, begun in the USA in the late 1960s, for the traditional owner/operator framework to be superseded by a structure in which the ownership of the asset is vested in one entity while the day-to-day management of the hospitality business is carried out by a third party
3 Increasing emphasis on the financial aspects of hospitality operations and ownership brought about by a shift in focus to financial returns and away from traditional hospitality as the measure of success (and in part brought about by the entry of large financial institutions into hospitality ownership).
