Before you buy a hotel, it pays to do some detective work.

Most real estate listings give you the basics: room count, location, asking price. But the really valuable info like who owns the hotel, how it’s managed, and how much has been invested into it over time usually isn’t listed.

Luckily, in many countries, this information is hiding in plain sight. You just need to know where to look. In this post, we’ll show you how to go from a hotel listing to ownership and financial data using public tools and a few smart tricks.

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What You Can Learn (For Free or Cheap)

Using public databases and company registries, you can often discover:

• Who owns the hotel
• If it’s part of a larger group of hotels or real estate portfolio
• Whether the hotel is owner-operated or managed by a third party
• Historical sale prices or collateral data, especially for SPV (Special Purpose Vehicles) purchases
• CAPEX data - how much was invested in renovations over the years
• Red flags like financial distress or heavy debt loads

This is the kind of information that gives you leverage in negotiations, or helps you walk away from a bad deal.

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Start With the Hotel’s Website

Many hotel listings, especially through agents, don’t link to the hotel’s official website. But at Buythathotel.com, we do the reverse: help you identify the hotel even if it’s not mentioned in the listing.

Why is that useful?

Because in many countries, it’s mandatory for hotels to include their VAT number in the footer of their website or in the legal notice section. Once you have that VAT number, you’re ready to go.

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From VAT Number to Company Data

Here’s how to go from a real estate listing to full company insights:

1. Find the hotel’s website
2. Look in the footer or legal page for the company name and VAT number
3. Paste that VAT number into Google or a country-specific tool (see list below)
4. Get free or paid access to the company’s financials

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What to Watch For

• This approach works best with independent hotels, where the property and operations are under the same entity.
• Many hotels are owned via SPVs, meaning investors pool funds into a single-asset company. These are often easy to trace and offer rich data.
• If a hotel is part of a management group, the footer may reveal the parent company, which might manage multiple other properties.
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Country-Specific Tools

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Evaluating the Deal

Now that you have the numbers, it’s time to do some calculations. Is it a good deal? Does the asking price fairly reflect the hotel’s revenue? What if you increase direct bookings by 10% — how much additional potential value could that unlock?

With all this data in hand, there are plenty of important questions to explore before making your decision.

To help you crunch the numbers, we’ve built a simple yet powerful tool to estimate a hotel’s value using a few straightforward methods: Room-Rate Multiplier, Bottle/Can Soda Multiplier, and Price Per Room (PPR) Sales Comparison.

Check it out here.