Ramsey Mankarious spent twenty years buying hotels while the industry chased brands. In March 2026, LVMH’s real estate arm decided he’d been right all along.
His career began not in ownership, but in valuation — at HVS International, pricing hotel risk across thirty countries before he ever underwrote his own deal. He moved into acquisitions at Kingdom Holding, jointly responsible for $2.5 billion in hotel investment across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Cedar Capital Partners, founded in 2004, was the instrument through which that discipline became independent. Every deal since has been built around the same conviction: that underwriting risk correctly matters more than the brand attached to the asset.
Cedar Capital Partners was built from that discipline. The belief that a hotel investment firm, properly conceived, is not a deal-by-deal business — it is a repeatable underwriting method. That method was tested through the 2008 financial crisis, when Cedar refused to overpay while competitors chased scale, and has since deployed over $5 billion across nearly every major hotel market in the world. Mankarious’s partnerships since — Goldman Sachs on The Belfry, Broadreach on Sundance, Ares on a pan-European lifestyle portfolio — each apply that same underwriting logic to a new asset class.
Cedar × L Catterton: A joint venture that turned two decades of independent underwriting into an institutional-grade platform — targeting ten to fifteen landmark hotels across Europe and North America, backed by LVMH’s consumer-investment capital.
Penha Longa Resort: A former royal retreat inside a protected natural park, acquired intact on day one of the platform’s launch — proof that heritage hospitality, correctly capitalised, outperforms reinvention.
Four deals spanning golf, mountain, beachfront, and lifestyle hospitality — each built on the same underwriting conviction that institutional capital follows proven discipline, not the other way around.
Market thesis: Mankarious proved what most hotel investors still treat as folklore: that underwriting discipline, applied consistently across cycles, outperforms brand loyalty every time. Cedar bought The Belfry when golf resorts were unfashionable. It bought Sundance when ski resorts were distressed assets. It recapitalised a European lifestyle portfolio when lifestyle hotels were considered too small to interest institutional capital. Each time, an institutional partner arrived after the underwriting was already proven — Goldman Sachs, then Ares, now LVMH’s L Catterton. The pattern is the thesis: conviction first, capital second. Those still waiting for institutions to identify the opportunity are missing that the opportunity was priced correctly twenty years ago.
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