Mohari CEO Smith talks growth plans

As a result, the increasingly active luxury developer founded in 2017 by Mark Scheinberg (co-founder of online poker company PokerStars) is one of the companies to watch with Smith, CEO since January 2022, exclusively telling Hotel Investment Today that the family office-backed investment platform’s intention over time is to build out a very distinctive portfolio. Today, assets under management for the New York City-based company is already well into the billions of dollars and include luxury properties such as the Four Seasons Madrid, 1 Hotel Toronto, a Baccarat in Florence, Italy, as well as three resort and residences at Peninsula Papagayo in Costa Rica.

Mohari focuses on opportunities with deep value add and, therefore, leads them to projects that involve ground-up development, repositioning of existing hotels, or adaptive re-use of existing buildings. In some instances, but not all, these properties are available because the owner is experiencing some form of distress and needs to sell.

In fact, Smith said Mohari aspires to create its own more contemporary luxury brand – something with more programming to meet evolving expectations of the marketplace.

The company’s website shows 16 hotel assets open or under development with Smith suggesting the total reaches between 20 and 25 when considering other assets in various stages of development. Most recently, Mohari acquired the venerable Hotel Bauer in Venice with hopes to make it the luxury leader in the market.

“We’re fully committed to the luxury and lifestyle sectors, and there a number of verticals where we are certainly active,” said Smith, who ended a five-year run as president and CEO of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts in December 2018. “We have operating hotels and an extensive development portfolio, and we’ll continue to participate in that, both in Europe and North America.”

Development partnerships

Since its inception, Smith said Mohari has strategically evolved from being a collection of assets to being a platform that is much more capable of investing across different verticals to build scale and build an advantage to access some of the types of assets that it is interested in.

“We have formed a number of development partnerships with groups who really bring extraordinary on-the-ground capability that allows us to extend our reach beyond our direct team,” Smith explained. “The Bauer and our project in Paris [Hôtel Saint-James & Albany] are good examples of that where we’ve worked in concert with our partner, Omnam, who is very active in the space. It has given us the capacity to access these sorts of opportunities.”

Over the course of certainly 2025, and beyond, Smith said Mohari’s expectation is to more actively work with other sources of capital, in part, to continue to support the growth of their platform and what they’re trying to accomplish broadly.

In Paris, the Hôtel Saint-James & Albany is going to be converted into a luxury hotel with about 105 keys. Smith said it has some great heritage elements to it, including interior courtyard chateau that dates back to the 1700s, that creates an opportunity to a distinctive environment and storytelling capabilities. It closed in September with construction expected to start this year.

Smith added that Mohari and Omnam have a lot going on in Italy. Spain is a market they like a lot and Greece is a market they’re very interested in. There are also selected cities like London where they’d like to be, even though it’s a hard market to crash as well as expensive. They like Amsterdam, as well, and Smith said they will continue to explore a variety of these sorts of markets with Omnam, both urban and resort properties, as they present themselves.

Mohari has parallel approach in the U.S., where it has a couple similar development partnerships with groups that can, in effect, put them in a position to develop a proprietary pipeline of deals.

San Francisco-based real estate and investment firm JMA Ventures and Mohari in October 2023 entered into a strategic joint venture to acquire, recapitalize, and develop up to $2 billion of luxury hospitality and mixed-use projects throughout North America.

JMA and Mohari are currently working a high-end residential development in conjunction with a ski mountain project in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, called Homewood.

“Lake Tahoe is a very hard market to get into and we tend to gravitate toward markets like that,” Smith said. “High barriers to entry often mean these things take time.”

Bethesda, Maryland-based Weller Development Partners and Mohari announced a strategic partnership in May 2024 with plans to co-invest up to $2.5 billion in luxury hospitality and mixed-use projects in North America and the Caribbean. The investment will bolster Weller’s current investments, including the Six Senses Napa in California and Six Senses Grand Bahama in the Bahamas, which are in early stages of development, and provides a platform for future investments.

Smith said Mohari like the opportunity to participate with Six Senses as it tries to meaningfully penetrate the North American market. “They have a really interesting brand and an interesting distinctive positioning in the market that should resonate with people,” he said. “We see it as an interesting opportunity to play a part in that expansion into North America.”

Preferred adjacencies

In addition to hotel development, Mohari has 30% stake in the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection along with heavyweight partners Oaktree, GIC and Marriott International. “We’re very bullish on that sector and expect to continue to build that out,” Smith added.

In the food and beverage adjacency, it acquired in 2023 Tao Group Hospitality, a high-energy, entertainment-driven fine dining business, as well as a stake in a smaller, Miami-based F&B operator called Riviera Dining Group.

“What we like about these groups is their operating platforms. They’re content creators, in the sense that, if you think about kind of hospitality at this point, the things that differentiate some of the best products is their capacity to create these experiences and an entertainment-driven quality that we think that the marketplace really values,” Smith said.

Mohari’s partnership with JMA Ventures includes development of a sports and entertainment district, including a hotel, surrounding the arena for the NBA’s Orlando Magic.

“We like that space because as these sports franchises escalate in value, the owners are also thinking of other ways that they can monetize the value of those franchises,” Smith said. “Part of the way they do that is in the real estate around the arenas.”

Smith also likes media-related opportunities that take of an owned assets to create content and need the hotel’s operating capabilities for things like food and beverage.

The White Lotus series is such an example that converged with luxury hospitality at one of Mohari’s Four Seasons hotels. It is not an overt branding opportunity, but Smith said everyone knows it’s a Four Seasons.

“We see a lot of natural alignment between hospitality and the broader entertainment sector; there’s so much potential mutual benefit for productions and the properties at which they film,” Smith said. “It’s certainly something we’re open to exploring if the right opportunities arise.”

Plans for Hotel Bauer

Looking closer at the Hotel Bauer deal, Smith said a lot of persistence and perseverance paid off to get the deal done. “At the end of the day, like a lot of things, it reached a point where speed and certainty were important for getting this done,” he added.

At the end of the day, Smith said Mohari digs in deep to a lot of opportunities and does as much or more work than anyone else and demonstrate its capacity to execute. Then, at the end of the day, he said being able to offer speed and certainty when it matters is often a critical dimension in these deals.

It remains early days on detailed plans for Hotel Bauer, which will be managed by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, with Smith saying it is a heritage building with a stripped-out interior and an opportunity to create what should be the best hotel in Venice.

“The Bauer will be a trophy. It’s not a trophy today and it’s going to take a tremendous amount of work and value add to get it there,” Smith said. “Once we do, we’ll be in a position to decide what to do with it. But generally, we’re much more inclined, especially with those kinds of assets, to be holders. And there’s an interesting opportunity, over time, to aggregate a portfolio of these kinds of properties that arguably will be without peer in the marketplace. And that's certainly one of the things we’re working towards.”

When asked about the outlook for luxury hotelkeeping Smith said Mohari feels good about the state of affairs.

“Obviously, there are idiosyncrasies associated with specific markets, but generally speaking, the outlook we see continues to be favorable,” he said. “The same as all the strength we’ve seen recently – maybe not quite but it certainly continues to be positive. There are no signs that I see right now that there’s a meaningful correction in luxury travel that’s about to hit us... We continue to feel quite bullish and like our positioning in the space.”

By Jeffrey Weinstein