Stephen Wendell of Mountain Shore Properties: 5 Questions

You can trace the history of Mountain Shore Properties back to the 1980s, when the firm had no name and was run by Stephen Wendell’s father, Charlie Wendell.

In 1983, the older Wendell founded the company by opening his first Holiday Inn hotel in Oak Hill, W.Va., not far from where he was born and was raising a family. When Stephen Wendell joined the company in 2012 — following law school and a stint as a junior legal counsel with the Philadelphia Eagles — he knew it was time to grow the business, feeling that there was so much more the firm could do.

Now, with the younger Wendell at the helm as CEO, Mountain Shore is a national real estate development company with over $400 million in project value, focusing on a mix of hospitality, residential and office properties. Its portfolio spans more than 25 cities across 11 states.

And it’s also about to open its 30th hotel, a boutique inn in the Wendell family’s hometown in West Virginia.

Commercial Observer caught up with Stephen Wendell last month to discuss the founding of Mountain Shore, the firm’s portfolio, and the lessons each new project imparts. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Commercial Observer: What is the history of Mountain Shore Properties?

Stephen Wendell: Mountain Shore Properties essentially emanated from the real estate development company that my dad started in the early `80s. There was no name for the company at that point in time, but he started doing real estate development in the `80s — hotels specifically. He opened his first hotel the month I was born, so almost 43 years ago, in our small town in Fayetteville, W.Va.

There’s now this full-circle moment, because we’re going to open a small boutique hotel in Fayetteville in August. 

When I got out of law school, I worked in Philadelphia for a year for the Eagles, and was doing real estate on the side, and then went to work for a law firm. After a while, I told my dad I wanted to work with him, and that I had ideas on how to expand on what he’d done. He said, “Let’s do it,” and I said, “We need a website, we need a brand, and we need a mission.”

He had already put that stuff into motion, and I think I’ve done a lot of materializing and solidifying that.

Where did the name come from?

Mountain Shore Properties is very simple. We were born in the mountains of West Virginia, but I was raised in Charleston, S.C., so that name kind of denotes where I’ve lived and where we’ve lived. 

We do a lot of development along the East Coast, from the Northeast to the mountainous mid-Atlantic region, and all the way down to Florida. So the name Mountain Shore Properties tells the story of where we develop.

The mission is simple: We deliver incredible investment projects that are great for us and great for the communities we’re in. 

You have a diversified portfolio, both geographically and by asset. How does the firm decide what it will build and where? 

We are very diversified, and that’s intentional. I think our investors are happy that we both diversify asset classes and diversify geographically.

A lot of real estate folks do only one thing, and that’s because they can do it well. We have a lot of prolific multifamily developers, and that’s all they do, but that’s not in our DNA.  It’s not in my DNA — I’m a little bit more curious about a bunch of different things.

I would say that we’re most known for doing hotels. That’s what people know us for, but the other asset classes we work in are very entrepreneurial. We’ve done a dozen projects in Philadelphia because I live here and have a tie here.

We will develop non-hotels in cities where we have an extra layer of information or knowledge, whether it’s because we’ve lived there, or it’s because we’ve done a hotel project there and that introduced us to the market, the brokers and the contractors. So we get to know that market a little bit more, and we’ll say we can go do another asset there.

Nashville is a great example of this. We ended up doing three projects there, and I wish we could have done a dozen. We built a hotel and then we did a mixed-use kind of Airbnb atop retail, and then we did a mixed-use office building. 

We’re in 13 states now. Our goal is not to get to 50, but to stay selective east of the Mississippi. Right now, I would say that the core focus is specifically on hotels and trying to get a little bit more narrowed as to where we want to develop.

Is there a hotel project you’ve worked on that stands out in your mind?

All of them have a story. Hotel development is the hardest commercial real estate investment to execute, specifically lifestyle hotels, where you have a restaurant, because now you’ve added the other hardest thing to do, which is open and operate a restaurant. But there are two that stick out, one is pre-COVID-19 and the other is post-pandemic. 

Nashville had been a city that was on my radar from when I joined the company. I took a trip to Nashville in 2014 and said to my dad, “Hey, we have got to do something here, this checks every box. Let’s do it.” And in 2014 people were saying we were late to entering Nashville, which is hilarious when you think about where Nashville is today, 12 years later. And so we scoured. It took us two years to find the right site and get it under contract. Meanwhile, the land prices are continuing to go up, and you’re feeling like you’re always behind the eight ball.

But I had the conviction to create a relationship with Hyatt because at the time, the site that we wanted in SoBro, there weren’t as many brands in 2015 and 2016 as there are today. So, I created a relationship with Hyatt — which was under-represented in that market — to do Hyatt House. We executed on the largest construction project that we’ve ever done, the largest loan that we’ve ever done, and we’re getting to that finish line, we’re 10 months from opening, and the market is just crazy.

This is 2019 now, everybody is wanting to buy in Nashville, and there’s REITs coming out of the woodwork, just buying already built products.  We exited the property on March 11, 2020. That was a 100 percent capital return to our investors, never having operated the property.

What was the other project?

On the other side of COVID-19, the project that stuck out is this hotel that we’re building in my hometown of Fayetteville, W.Va., where the national park is in West Virginia. It is these old schools — literally where I went to elementary school, and where my father and mother went to high school. We have taken the old schools and converted them into a 40-room boutique hotel called Hill Hall, which is affiliated with Marriott, and the restaurant is going to be called Patsy’s. 

The restaurant is named after my grandmother, whose book of family recipes, which she wrote and illustrated by hand, is the inspiration for the menu. It is a very beautiful, nostalgic story of a company that started their business building the 13th Hampton Inn in the country in 1985, and now we will be opening Hill Hall, which will be our 30th hotel. 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.