Richard Born On Bankrupting Hotels

We've been suggesting for a while that BD's strategy is to bankrupt the hotel so that they can buy it cheap.  How else to explain their slashing of rates, warehousing of rooms, doubling of staff and otherwise mismanaging the hotel. In an interview for The New York Sun Richard Born comes clean on his strategy:

"I probably get a call every day from someone asking if I want to joint venture or invest in their new hotel project. When I discuss the perils of new development at this time most people laugh and suggest that I just want to discourage others from building so I can monopolize that market myself. My response is simply that I would rather purchase new hotels from the banks in three years at 50% discount, than invest at full price today."

He goes into some rigamarole about declining occupany rates and the like which I don't have the patience to attempt to decipher at this moment, but according to Born, the bottom line is:

"...That would surely be enough to effectively bankrupt every newly built hotel and any existing hotel carrying a large debt burden."  -- Ed Hamilton