Hotel Investments: Why Developer Reputation is More Reliable Than “Guaranteed” Returns

Recently, in Alanya, I recorded an interview with our Turkish partner, developer Mehmet Ali, at the site of his project Grand Calibri by Ribas. The video has already been published on the Ribas Hotels Group channel. Most of the conversation is about how to build a five-star hotel in seven months. But at the end I said something I consider just as important for anyone thinking about investing in hotel real estate. Here I want to develop those thoughts in more detail.

Guarantees in investing have limits

I often come across offers with a guaranteed yield, so let me say honestly what I think about them. Wherever the word “investment” appears, I would treat the word “guarantee” with great caution. Even gold or the shares of large companies carry neither a guaranteed yield nor guaranteed liquidity: prices change, and it is not always possible to sell an asset at the moment you need to, or at the price you need.

Risk as the price of income without your involvement

An investment always involves a certain level of risk, and it is for this risk that we receive capital growth and returns without taking part in the day-to-day operation of the hotel. Those who want to control everything and react quickly to change build their own business. But every entrepreneur knows that predictability does not exist there either: good today, worse tomorrow, good again the day after.

That is why, when you put your money into an investment, there are two things to do. The first is to thoroughly study the project and the developer or company you are investing in. The second is to hand over the money to the one you have chosen, trust the process, and allow yourself to receive dividends calmly.

What stands behind a guaranteed rate

If something happens to a business or to a country, there may be no one left to honor the obligations. The company declares bankruptcy, and the guarantee letters and contract clauses that looked reliable yesterday lose their force. It is worth remembering this before treating a guarantee as protection.

There is another side as well. Sometimes a high guaranteed rate appears where the developer is not sure they can sell all the units, or that they will have enough funds to finish the project. In that case the guarantee becomes a way to attract more investors. In the worst case, payments under it are made from the contributions of the next investors. This is exactly how financial pyramids work, and it is a genuine time bomb.

An honest business is simpler: it earns income, bears its costs, and distributes the profit among investors. It makes no difference whether there is one investor, as in the own hotels of my partner Mehmet Ali, or several, or whether half of a hotel belongs to one owner and the other half is sold by the room. The principle of distributing dividends is the same and clear, and it does not include guarantees.

What to study instead of promised percentages

So I advise spending a little more time: read everything about the developer, the project, and the management company, and then come and see it all with your own eyes. This is exactly why we record interviews like this one and organize investor tours: to show the developer’s capital, his attitude toward people, and toward the work he does.

Mehmet Ali is already building the fourth hotel of his career. Together with our team and investors, we visited his residential and commercial complex New Level, the shipyard where the cruise liner he is building with a partner for himself is under construction, and a new quarry where crushed stone is extracted. At each of these enterprises he knows almost everyone, and people know him. By my estimate, the capitalization of his businesses is several times the cost of this hotel. For me this is a signal: he would have built the hotel even without a single sale, because he has his own resources. And therefore he does not need to promise a guaranteed income that would later have to be paid out at the expense of the next investor.

The pace of work is also an indicator. According to Mehmet, the land was purchased in 2025, construction began in 2026, and in about seven months the hotel was brought to its current stage. And then there is the result: on October 9, when we recorded the interview, only nine rooms out of almost four hundred were vacant at Grand Calibri Prestige, which has been operating for almost ten years, while some neighboring hotels stood half empty. This shows how much depends on the team and the system of work.

See it with your own eyes

If you are considering investing in hotel real estate, do not rush. Study the developer and the management company, ask questions, go and look at the project and at the people who are creating it. A decision made after that will be your conscious choice, and you will be able to trust the process calmly.