Minibar and Loan Market Update from Bridge, January 2026

My name is Rohit Mathur (and again I typed this entire newsletter, not chatgpt). I’m the co-founder and CEO of Bridge, a direct lender and marketplace for hotel loans. Before founding Bridge, I spent 10+ years at Citi in capital markets.

Bridge closed $500.0 million+ in loans in 2025 and have already closed our first few deals of 2026. We saw a wide range of deal terms last year – we saw a hotel acquisition deal price at 6.25% (80% LTV) with a conventional bank and on the other end saw deals at 12.25% (75% LTC) for ground up construction with private debt lenders. Understandable given the swing we saw in 2026 interest rates. We expect 2026 will have a far lower range band given stabilization in interest rates.

We’ll be at ALIS in LA and would love to meet

Schedule Time With Me HERE: Meeting Booking Link

TLDR: What’s Moving in the Loan Market

1. Chart of the month – credit is shifting from banks to investors
2. Key Observations as we start the year
3. 3 Key Themes for 2026
4. Rates

Chart of the Month

Most lending in the US market has moved away from US Banks towards private credit only 28% of all the debt is now provided by banks. Source: Apollo December Report

Key Observations: What are people going to be talking about in 2026?

1. Tracking Sentiment through Hotel Conferences! 2026 kicks off with ALIS!

1. We’re going to track sentiment across the year through the various conferences we attend
2. Going back in time… a few observations from ALIS 2025 – new administration was about to come in and there was significant optimism for lower rates, less regulation, lower taxes
3. Here are notes from a 2025 post-ALIS CBRE article:
   1. Moderating interest rates, a challenging development market, record dry powder, and a narrowing of buyer and seller expectations are hopeful indications that 2025 should see a stronger transaction market. Among the investors surveyed, 94% plan to maintain or increase their hotel investments in 2025, up from 85% last year.
4. However, as we know, while 2025 showed some signs of improvement, overall the activity was still down and the industry was still in a “discovery phase – trying to bridge the gap between he bid-ask spread”
5. But… 2026 is now here, and there are plenty of signs for optimism
   1. Rates are lower!
   2. Tariff pressure has stabilized (and lowered – huge win recently on Furniture Tariffs Delayed by 1 Year)
   3. Huge demand driver coming to the US Market (covered below – World Cup!)
6. PS: Shivan and I will be at ALIS in 2 weeks and would love to meet you! Please schedule time here: LINK

2. World Cup 2026

• Special Events will likely lead to a boost to US RevPar – while 2026 is expected to have low RevPar growth from 2025, one bright spot will be the World Cup, which typically leads to significant travel into the host country

• Here are two interesting charts related to the World Cup

PS: If anyone has tickets to give away? We’re accepting.

3. Underwriting based on 2025 – ugh!

• 2025 has been a softer year for US Hotel owners with RevPar being flat to down and higher costs to operate i.e. lower NOI

• 2026 underwriting will unfortunately rely on 2025 comparables and NOI
• What does this mean?
  • If you want to buy a hotel in 2026, the lender will want to ensure that you have ~1.25x DSCR and ~70% LTV – that DSCR is being calculated using a T12 NOI, that NOI is lower
  • Lower NOIs in 2025 will create a bid-ask spread on acquisition values

• Property values have adjusted as interest rates have gone up over the past few years (2022-2024). Cap rates, which were very low coming out of the pandemic recovery, are now back up in the 8% range
  • Now that’s largely driven by higher borrowing costs, but it’s also resetting expectations across the market
  • Sellers are becoming more flexible, land and asset pricing is more realistic, and there’s less competition from all these buyers who relied on cheap debt
  • For developers, this means a better entry point and more room to make deals work
  • At these pricing levels, the gap between what it costs to build or buy and what the property is worth once stabilized is starting to matter again
  • Projects that can achieve stabilized returns in the 9 to10%+ range are underwriting more cleanly, particularly in extended-stay, select-service, and conversion driven deals where costs and execution risk is usually more manageable
• Overall lending environment is better at the start of 2026 than it was at the same time last year, so competition and availability of capital should go up!

4. Jobs vs. GDP Growth Rates – what can hotel owners do?

• I’m only an econ minor but I found the following charts fascinating:
  • Job growth in 2025 was anemic
  • GDP growth in 2025 was robust
  • The size of government reduced
• Economists are calling this a jobless or low-job expansion
• So – where is this GDP growth coming from?
  • Answer: Productivity + capex + inventories + government + net exports

Potential occupancy driver for Hotel owners: Productivity is coming from AI and a significant investment driver in AI are data center builds. So where are these Data Centers being built?

3 Key Themes for 2026

Theme 1: 2026 underwriting is being framed as a “tailwind year,” but mostly via events + easing comps, not aggressive numeric guidance. As noted above 2026 underwriting is based on 2025 actuals, only certain markets will see a “World Cup projection”

Theme 2: Conversions are the growth engine across the board : the brand ecosystem is increasingly set up to absorb independent or lightly-branded properties into conversion-friendly flags/collections—supporting faster “time-to-RevPAR lift” vs. ground-up

Theme 3: The market sentiment sweet spot is concentrating around upper mid-scale / extended stay / higher-yield select-service— investor sentiment continues to focus on extended stay and select-service

Rates

About Bridge

We are the first fintech focused on Hospitality loans and partners with Hilton, AAHOA, Choice, Red Roof and others.

We have two new partnership announcements coming soon!!!

We’ve closed and funded $500.0 million+ in loans in 2025 (Our 1st full year of Hotel Lending) and we only have one goal:

Simplifying access to competitive financing for your hotel loan.

Tools to Help You Get Funded

1. Five-click Pro Forma Generator – Link
2. C-PACE Calculator – determine if your project is CPACE eligible and how much you can get – Link
3. DSCR Calculator – does your deal cash flow – Link
4. Free Offering Memo – Have we generated an Offering Memorandum for you yet? We’ve built an OM for over 150 other projects in the past 3 months- get one now Link
5. Data Room – the cost of not having everything in one place is that lenders move on to the next deal – we’ve built a hospitality focused deal room (Want to see it? Just reply to this email and I’ll give you a live demo)

Where will Bridge be in Q1 2026?

• HYPE AAHOA Conference – Miami, FL – February 2026

• ALIS – Los Angeles, CA – January 2026

  Schedule a meeting here: Meeting Booking Link

• Hunter Hotel Investment Conference – Atlanta, GA – March 2026

Bridge Minibar Update

Here is a picture from our December Holiday Party – the minibar is getting replenished thanks to the various holiday gifts and dry January!