A lodging business in a working city
Bakersfield is described as a hub for agriculture and energy production, with distribution, food processing, mining, petroleum refining and corporate regional offices around it, and it had a 2020 population of 403,455. Its lodging demand therefore follows the work calendar: business and contract travelers, crews working at nearby operations, and families passing through. Delano, Wasco, Tehachapi, Ridgecrest, Taft and Shafter are among the nearby places in the county.
Compared with a resort town, such a market can be less seasonal in a tourist sense, but occupancy can move with harvest timing, project schedules and the demand cycle in the industries the county depends on.
An unsold room is gone for good
A hotel or motel sells nights that cannot be stored. Whether a property runs at a high or a low occupancy, costs such as the mortgage or lease, payroll, utilities, insurance, linens, housekeeping and property taxes stay. That makes occupancy swings more painful than they are for a store that can hold unsold stock.
The California economy as a whole is described as the largest in the United States, with a $4.048 trillion gross state product as of 2024, but a single property's cash position depends on a few dozen rooms and a few months of bookings.
The renovation trap
Older properties need work: roofs, HVAC, flooring, bathrooms, mattresses, a reservation system. Each room that is closed to renovate stops earning. A common mistake is to schedule the work for the slow period and then find that the slow period is also when cash is lowest.
For illustration only: an owner closes 10 of 40 rooms for three weeks to redo bathrooms, spending $60,000. If a room earns $90 a night, those ten closed rooms represent roughly $18,900 in revenue not booked over the three weeks, in addition to the cost of the work. These figures are an example and not our terms.
What lodging owners typically fund
- Room refreshes and bathroom upgrades, so more rooms rate higher.
- Replacement of HVAC units, water heaters and laundry equipment, covered at equipment financing.
- Payroll and housekeeping for the busier stretches, through working capital.
- A buffer for a slow month, similar in purpose to a business line of credit.
What we offer and what we read
We fund from $25,000 to $5,000,000, with funding in as little as 24 hours after the file is complete. A FICO score of 500 or higher is considered. We ask for about three months of business bank statements, no tax returns are required, and the application takes about five minutes with a soft credit pull. Sole proprietors can apply, which includes owner-operators of a small motel or inn.
Booking platform payouts, card settlements and direct bookings all show up in the statements, so it is fine to have more than one source of deposits. Apply here.