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On this podcast, we talk story about everything you need to know to make money investing in hotels and in hospitality assets.

My guests today are Adam Walls and Micah Thomas, co-founders of Comeback Hospitality, who are turning a rundown 1960s motel in Page, Arizona into a 50-room boutique hotel.

Adam, Micah, welcome to the show.

thank you thank you for having us i'm excited to be here i

But that's a lot of pain on the journey.

And just to... piggyback on what you're saying that's just to talk about the actual asset but there's a business side of things where you have to manage and delegate actual individuals right you have to get a group of people staff to buy into your vision we're two new guys buying this property we inherited all the staff like we said before we decided not to fire anyone but now we have to work with them to teach them our mission our goals our value you guys were once working at a one-star motel the worst hotel arguably in town.

And we're working to make this the best hotel in Page, Arizona.

There's 25 hotels and we want to be the best and we want to have some of the highest rates in town and offer the best experience.

He is a health inspector, uh, at, in Mumbai, which is the, uh, as the BBC reminds us, India's financial capital and the capital of its richest state.

Um, and he has been posting photos of all of the gross things he has found in somewhat fancy places.

Mm-hmm.

Um, [laughs] since taking charge in May, Munde has overseen thousands of inspections and says food safety laws must be enforced regardless of a business's size, influence, or reputation.

So if you're going to go there, you're going to want to stay, maybe stay in Laughlin on the Colorado River, which is a great place to stay.

You can stay in Page, Arizona.

You can't stay in Oatman, and you really don't want to camp there.

especially if you're there in the summer.

I went when I was very young.

"And Upper Antelope Canyon in Page, Arizona" Also been.

Uh, "we love trains and whenever possible try to fit rail trips into our travels.

The Durango-Silverton Railroad is one of the last remaining narrow gauge lines in the country, built of lightweight rail to handle the narrow winding routes in the mountains.

If you like trains, put this one on your list.

Our last adventure of the trip was a visit to beautiful Upper Antelope Canyon.

This slot canyon is on Navajo land, it's just outside Page, Arizona, and it's one of the most photographed places in the world.

As many as 5,000 people a day walk through this short, beautiful slice in the earth.

First night, we came out of Lee's Ferry and heading down Colorado.

And it's up towards Page, Arizona at that end.

And we're getting ready to set up camp for that night.

And one of the guys says like, yeah, you need to move all these camps back up the hill some.

So originally looking around Lake Havasu, the numbers just weren't penciling out.

And then we started looking around Lake Powell and that's how we ended up in Page, Arizona with our first house.

love it and so so we pick paige um start looking for the houses that paige is obviously you know you've got outside of just lake powell you've got i mean you guys are really close to horseshoe bend which a lot of people that are at least not familiar with uh maybe lake powell they're familiar with those shoot those all the instagram photos of horseshoe bend it's a it's a very instagram is area that's you know on the colorado river there everybody likes the red rocks and and the desert down there but it is it's a market that when you chose it, right? It's not a major market.

Like when you're looking at it and you were looking, it was close to home.

You're starting to, you know, you still are maintaining at the top.

Hopefully that revenue for the market in general comes down or comes up a little bit because a lot of the markets have still continued to set record revenue numbers on the consumer spending money.

Page was a market that actually didn't.

And it actually took a hit.

Um, but I wonder, you know, like, how long did it take to make it?

We shot this over four days, eh, technically five days out in the American desert Southwest out of Page, Arizona.

That's where we based, was the Page, Arizona airport.

It was kind of a three-way collaboration between Cirrus.

We were producing, uh, like I said, Rogue Labs, uh, specifically JR and his team.

It...

The two nicest place I've be- ever been in my life was Maui, Kauai, Hawaii, and Page, Arizona.

Page, Arizona-

Yes

... gets the nod.

Yes.

1995, I was there.

Page, Arizona.

And so they decided to build storage, in other words, reservoirs, to be able to even out the water supply, particularly for the lower basin, for Arizona, California, Nevada, and eventually Mexico.

There are two big reservoirs in the system, Lake Powell near Page, Arizona, and Lake Mead near Las Vegas.

And these two, they're enormous reservoirs, and they have been experiencing persistent declines in reservoir level over this century.

In the last couple of weeks, they both have reached historic lows in storage, and that's what we're dealing with right now.