Independent Hotel & Hospitality Consulting

Hotel & hospitality consulting for developers, lenders, and litigators.

Market feasibility, valuation, asset management, and expert witness work for hotels, resorts, and F&B operations. No franchise affiliations, no institutional conflicts — only the analysis the market supports.

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Practice Areas

Practice areas.

Every engagement is built on the same foundation — USALI-compliant financial modeling, transparent assumptions, and evidence that holds up whether it is read by a lender, a board, or a federal arbitration panel.

01 — Development

Market Feasibility & Development Advisory

New construction feasibility, brand and flag selection analysis, competitive market impact, and site analysis. Projections produced as Statements of Estimated Annual Operating Results in USALI format — built to survive a lender's underwriting, not to decorate a pitch deck.

Full-serviceLimited-serviceExtended-stayResort

02 — Financial

Financial & Asset Advisory

Acquisition due diligence, portfolio valuation, asset management, and operating performance review. Monthly asset management reporting delivered in USALI format. The same analytical rigor applied to new-build feasibility, turned on assets already in the ground.

Acquisition DDValuationAsset mgmtHold / sell

03 — Litigation

Expert Witness & Litigation Support

Hotel management disputes, damages calculations, industry standards analysis, and rebuttal review. Qualified testimony in AAA arbitration and federal court. Forty years of engagement-level exposure translated into testimony that withstands cross-examination.

AAA arbitrationFederal courtDamagesRebuttal

04 — Public sector

Economic Impact & Public-Body Analysis

Employment and tax revenue impact for proposed hotel and convention developments, presented in a register that works for city councils, planning commissions, and CVBs. Community benefit framing supported by data, not adjectives.

Planning commissionsCVBsMunicipal

05 — F&B

Restaurant & F&B Analysis

Market feasibility and performance analysis for standalone restaurants, hotel F&B departments, and food-service concepts. Grounded in six years of operational experience in industrial and airline food service before forty years of consulting.

StandaloneHotel F&BOperations review

06 — Technology

CRE Nexus — Transparent Underwriting Platform

An institutional-grade feasibility platform developed in-house. Pre-loaded with a 15 GB vault of government data, USALI-compliant financial modeling, and a transparency layer that keeps AI commentary architecturally separated from the numbers. Details below →

In-house platformBeta 2026

Now in private beta

CRE Nexus. An underwriting platform built in-house.

CRE Nexus is the underwriting platform we use on every engagement. A USALI-compliant financial engine, a curated public-data vault, and a multi-agent review layer — built on a principle we refuse to compromise: the AI can comment on the numbers, but it cannot change them.

Public-source data vault. Government and public-record series — BLS, Census, BTS, FHWA, IRS migration, SEC filings — refreshed on schedule and keyed to FIPS.
USALI-compliant forecasting. Ten-year pro formas, capital stack, waterfall, and sensitivity — built to lender underwriting standards, not a generic template.
Full provenance, every number. Every data point carries a named source, a pull date, and a row count. When a lender asks where a figure came from, the audit trail is on the page.
Tribunal review, architecturally read-only. Five perspectives — Bull, Bear, Operator, Capital Markets, Appraiser — deliberate over the vault data and the financial model. They can flag concerns. They cannot touch an assumption.
No proprietary data risk. No STR, no CoStar redistribution. Everything in the vault is public-source, independently derived, and safe to include in a client deliverable.

Request a Nexus demo

cre-nexus · fips 17031 · chicago cbd

Signal Coverage — Chicago CBD

37 signals · 94% coverage · pulled 2026-04-14

Lodging employment (QCEW)

SRC: BLS · CBSA 16980

+4.2%

Airport enplanements

SRC: BTS T-100 · ORD+MDW

+2.8%

CMBS hotel DSCR (median)

SRC: SEC EDGAR · 147 props

1.47×

Convention room-nights pace

SRC: MPEA · rolling 12mo

+6.1%

IRS inbound migration

SRC: IRS SOI · 2yr lag

−1.1%

Regional CRE lending (H.8)

SRC: FRED · weekly

flat

Architecture

Separation of concerns, enforced.

Six domains — ingest, market intelligence, financial engine, AI deliberation, comp intelligence, presentation — each independently testable. The financial engine is deterministic. The AI layer is read-only with respect to quantitative inputs. This is the architecture, not a convention.

Data lineage

Every figure, sourced.

Each signal carries a named government source, a pull timestamp, and a row count visible on the output. No scraped websites, no proprietary feeds that can't be cited. If an input is thin for a market, the system says so — it does not pretend to know what it doesn't.

Analyst control

Overrides are logged, not hidden.

Every analyst override carries a timestamp, a justification, and an auditable path from raw signal through assumption to conclusion. A lender reviewing the output can see exactly which inputs were adjusted, by whom, and why.

Chicago Market Coverage

Chicago CBD, 1960 to now.

We take the long view. Decades of continuous Chicago-area market coverage — across multiple economic cycles — inform every feasibility, valuation, and asset-management engagement.

Our Chicago CBD series runs continuously from 1960 through the most recent published year, capturing multiple full economic cycles in the downtown hotel market.

The depth of that record is what distinguishes a feasibility study grounded in observed cycle behavior from one extrapolated off a short comp set.

Chicago CBD · Occupancy & ADR

Annual · 1960 to present · Shaded bands = NBER recessions

Occupancy (left axis) ADR, nominal $ (right axis)

SOURCES: TRM INTERNAL RECORDS · SMITH TRAVEL RESEARCH · CHOOSE CHICAGO · NBER RECESSION DATES

Principals

Principals.

Every engagement is led, signed, and defended by a firm principal — in lender meetings and, when required, under cross-examination.

Theodore R. Mandigo

Founder & Director

CPAISHCCornell '66

Over fifty years in the hospitality industry. Founding member of the International Society of Hospitality Consultants. Former National Director of Hospitality Consulting at PKF; former Partner at BDO Seidman. Professor Emeritus at the Kendall College School of Hospitality Management, National Louis University.

Principal authority on the Chicago CBD hotel market. Quoted in the Chicago Tribune and Crain's Chicago Business. Qualified expert witness in AAA arbitration and federal court. Recipient of the Illinois Hotel & Lodging Association Lifetime Achievement Award, 2019.

Focus: Feasibility · Valuation · Expert witness
Education: Cornell (BS, Hotel Administration) · Loyola (MBA)
Recent: IHLA Lifetime Achievement Award, 2019

Richard S. Mandigo

Principal · Product Lead, CRE Nexus

MPACHEex-CBRE

Hospitality asset management and real estate finance background, including prior service as Hotels Advisory Consultant at CBRE supporting REIT acquisitions and public-private hotel developments.

Certified Hotel Educator. Leads the firm's technology practice and is the architect of CRE Nexus, the platform now running on every TRM engagement.

Focus: Underwriting · Asset management · CRE Nexus
Background: CBRE Hotels Advisory

Representative Engagements

Representative engagements.

A partial, anonymized view of recent work. Full engagement histories are shared in initial scoping conversations, subject to the confidentiality terms of each assignment.

Feasibility

Full-service, select-service, resort, and convention hotels

New construction, conversion, and refinancing studies across the Chicago CBD, the Midwest, and select national engagements. USALI-compliant projections delivered to lenders, sponsors, and rating agencies.

Multiple cycles

Valuation

Acquisition due diligence and portfolio underwriting

Property-level and portfolio underwriting for institutional and regional sponsors. Hold-sell, partner-level IRR, and operating-performance review.

Acquisition / DD

Expert witness

AAA arbitration and federal-court testimony

Hotel management disputes, damages calculations, and industry-standards testimony for ownership and franchise counsel. Reports survive cross-examination because assumptions are documented.

Litigation support

Public sector

Economic-impact studies for proposed developments

Employment, tax revenue, and room-night impact analyses presented to municipal authorities, planning commissions, and CVBs in support of public financing decisions.

Economic impact

Asset mgmt

Ongoing oversight and operator accountability

Monthly performance oversight in USALI format for owners and ownership groups. Operator scorecards, capital planning, and dispute-positioning when warranted.

Continuing

F&B

Restaurant and food-service feasibility

Standalone restaurant feasibility, hotel F&B departmental analysis, and food-service concept review. Grounded in operating experience, not benchmarks alone.

Concept review

Specific client and property names are confidential. Detailed engagement histories are reviewed under NDA in initial scoping conversations.

Engage

Start a conversation.

Initial scoping conversations are no-cost and held under confidentiality. We'll review the nature of the engagement, confirm there is no conflict, and — if we are the right fit — propose a scope and engagement letter typically within ten business days.

Theodore R. Mandigo, CPA, ISHC

Founder & Director — Feasibility · Valuation · Expert witness

Phone: (312) 671-9442
Email: [email protected]

Richard S. Mandigo, MPA, CHE

Principal — Underwriting · Asset management · CRE Nexus

Phone: (630) 981-1300
Email: [email protected]

Office

Chicago metropolitan area · engagements nationwide

Address: 338 North Highland Avenue
Elmhurst, IL 60126

Inquiry

All inquiries are routed to a firm principal. We respond within two business days.

Full name

Organization

Phone

Nature of engagement

Context

Submissions are treated as confidential for conflict-check purposes. This is not an engagement, and does not create an advisor-client or expert-witness relationship.