Alorie · Services · Owner's representation
Service 02
Operators, brands, architects and consultants all come to the table with an agenda of their own. We come with yours: negotiating the agreements, reviewing what is built and what is billed, and reporting to you in plain numbers.
An owner is usually the only party in the room without a specialist team behind them. The operator has one. The brand has one. The architects, the designers and the consultants each have one, and every one of those teams is doing its own job properly. Owner's representation puts a team of the same standing on your side of the table.
The work is what an owner would do with an in-house hotel division: read the agreements before they are signed, test what is being designed against what it will cost to run, check what is being billed against what was agreed, and keep one set of numbers that describes the asset honestly.
The operator is measured on its fee. The brand is measured on its standards. The asset is measured on what it is worth in ten years, and that is the number we work to.
Owners engage us for a defined stretch — an operator selection, a set of agreements, a construction stage — or keep us on retainer once the property is trading. Either way the people who do the work are the senior people you met.
Everyone around a hotel project answers to someone. This is what we ask of them, on your behalf.
Selection first, then the management agreement itself: fee structure, term, performance tests, termination, and the owner's rights to information and to approve a budget. We negotiate it from the owner's side, and we read the version that is actually signed.
Whether a brand earns its keep on this asset, what it obliges you to spend, and what it returns for that. An owner can be branded — including through our Dusit International representation — or run unbranded on a menu of consultancy and part-management services. Both work. They are different businesses.
What is drawn has to be run. We test the drawings against the operating model: back of house, service routes, kitchen and storage sizing, the areas that earn and the areas that only cost. Changes are cheap on paper and expensive in concrete.
Construction-stage monitoring against the owner's expectations rather than the programme's convenience, so that the standard of product and service is watched while there is still time to change it.
Cost control procedures, procurement held to the standards set in design, and the furniture, fittings and operating equipment inventories that show what was bought rather than what was budgeted.
Organisation and management structure, team evaluation and labour cost analysis: whether the hotel is staffed for the business it has, at a cost the margin can carry and without a drop in what the guest experiences.
An operations audit is the cheapest protection an owner can buy. It exists to defend the asset and the return on it, and it works best as routine rather than as a reaction: a detailed inspection of the property, carried out by a senior person, that says plainly what is working, what is not, and what it would cost to put right.
Our vice president carries out the inspection. Among the areas reviewed:
The findings come back as a list of things to do, in the order they pay. Owners commission an audit before they commit to an acquisition, when performance drifts away from the budget, or at a fixed point each year so that the drift is caught while it is still small.
Numbers, not narrative. What an owner gets from us is the reporting the hotel is actually run on, with a page in front of it that a board can read.
A residence sold by the unit and operated like a hotel is two businesses in one building. The units belong to individual buyers; the building still has to run to a single standard, and the developer still has to sell the next phase. A pooling programme is how those two things are held together.
Owners who want it place their unit in a rental programme and it joins the room inventory, managed under one operator with the housekeeping, maintenance, food and beverage and concierge that go with it. The unit owner keeps an agreed number of nights for their own use and takes a share of the revenue for the rest of the year, on written terms. For the developer it makes the real estate easier to sell; for the buyer it turns a second home into an asset that earns while it is empty.
Designing the programme is the work: the revenue-sharing arrangement between developer and unit owners, the inventory and record keeping, the terms of owner use, and the integration of all of it with the hotel's own operation. We do that next to the feasibility and the business model, because a pooling programme bolted on after the sales brochure is printed rarely holds.
Two we run:
The Sarawak Economic Development Corporation, the state's development agency, owns four hotels: the Grand Margherita Hotel and the Riverside Majestic Hotel in Kuching, and the Damai Beach Resort and Damai Lagoon Resort on the coast at Damai. Alorie is its hospitality consultant and owner's representative across all four.
The scope is the whole of the asset rather than one part of it: operations and guest experience, sales, marketing and revenue management, and the asset management that sits above them. Four hotels, four operations, one owner who needs them to read as one portfolio.
One email is enough: where the property is, what stage it is at, and what you need. We read every enquiry ourselves and reply personally.
Alorie Hospitality Management · L-3-7, Plaza Damas, 60 Jalan Sri Hartamas 1, Sri Hartamas, 50480 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia