I stopped arguing about room rates the day a revenue manager showed me the spreadsheet

I got dragged into a hotel walk because a friend of a friend needed someone to hold a tape measure. 140 keys, select service, built 2007, off a highway interchange that used to be busier than it is. The group looking at it was a fund with an operating partner, and I was there as an extra pair of hands for the property condition work.

What I remember is the revenue manager. She was maybe thirty, and she had the whole prior year up on a screen by day of week. Tuesday in October was a different business from Saturday in October. Not a little different. Rate spread of nearly ninety dollars and occupancy that swung from the low nineties to the forties depending on whether one particular corporate account had people in town. She pulled up a single Wednesday and said this is the night I lost, and walked me through the decision she made at 2pm to hold rate instead of dropping it, and how twelve rooms went empty that never came back.

I had spent two years thinking about rent as a number you set once a year. She was setting it about forty times a day.

The fund guy asked her one question the whole time, which was what happens to that corporate account if their plant runs a slower shift. She said we'd feel it in about three weeks. He wrote that down and nothing else.

They didn't buy it. Somebody told me later the operating agreement with the management company was where it fell apart, not the building. The roof was fine. The roof is never the problem.