New TR Mandigo Walk-In™: hotel feasibility from a street address. Now inviting testers →
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.

Request an engagement See Walk-In
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

TR Mandigo Walk-In — Feasibility from an Address

Our in-house feasibility platform. Enter a U.S. street address and Walk-In returns a Statement of Estimated Operating Results for a hotel at that site, built from more than 300 GB of public-record data, with the source of every figure on the page. Everything but fieldwork. Details below →

In-house platformTesters wanted
Now inviting testers

TR Mandigo Walk-In™. Everything but fieldwork.

We spent the past year building Walk-In, and as of October 2026 it is ready for its first testers. Give it a U.S. street address and it returns a Statement of Estimated Operating Results for a hotel at that site: the market, the competitive set, the demand, and a ten-year operating projection. It is the first look at a site, available before an offering memorandum or a T-12 exists. It is not the last word. And it is not an AI tool: no language model touches the numbers. A deterministic engine sets every figure from a public-record data vault, so the same address on the same data gives the same answer every time, and nothing is made up.

  • Any U.S. address. Big-metro downtown, interstate exit, or small town. Each study reads the site’s own market and the hotels that actually compete with it, not a national average. Where the evidence for a market is thin, the study says so.
  • Built with consultants, not around them. Walk-In does everything but the fieldwork. When a site is worth pursuing, the site visit, the judgment and the signed study stay with a consultant. Consultants can license Walk-In and put their own name on the work.
  • Public-record data vault. More than 300 GB of government and public-record data (BLS, Census, BEA, BTS, FHWA, IRS migration, SEC and CMBS filings, state lodging-tax receipts and lodging licenses), keyed to every U.S. county and metro and covering more than 55,000 hotels.
  • A USALI operating projection. A ten-year Statement of Estimated Operating Results in USALI format, with debt sizing, returns and sensitivity, plus a downloadable Excel workbook with every formula intact.
  • Full provenance, every number. Every figure carries its source and its date, and assumptions are labelled as assumptions. When a lender asks where a number came from, the answer is on the page.
  • Reviewed before it reaches the page. Every projection is checked before delivery. Review can flag a concern; it cannot change an assumption.
  • Tuned on your own book. Firms that license Walk-In will be able to set it to their own underwriting conventions and check it against their own past deals. A firm’s data tunes only that firm’s copy.
  • No proprietary data risk. No STR or CoStar redistribution. Everything in the vault is public-source or independently derived, and safe to cite in a client deliverable.
Become a tester License it for your practice
walk-in · fips 17031 · chicago cbd
Signal Coverage — Chicago CBD
Illustrative screen · 37 signals · 94% coverage
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
Illustrative values Source and date on every line
Architecture

Deterministic, by design.

The same address, on the same data, gives the same study. The financial engine is deterministic, and no language model sets or changes a figure. Data, market analysis, the financial engine and presentation are separate and independently tested. This is the architecture, not a convention.

Data lineage

Every figure, sourced.

Each figure carries a named source and its date, visible on the output. Where a figure comes from a public web page, that page is cited; nothing comes from a feed that can’t be cited. If an input is thin for a market, the study says so. It does not pretend to know what it doesn’t.

Analyst control

Overrides are logged, not hidden.

Every analyst override is logged beside the value the engine produced, so the path from source through assumption to conclusion stays auditable. 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. Its early decades are Ed Forrester’s downtown record, kept long before syndicated hotel benchmarks existed.

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: ED FORRESTER / TR MANDIGO & CO. (1960–1993) · CHICAGO CONVENTION & TOURISM BUREAU, CHOOSE CHICAGO (1994–2024) · NBER

Principals

Principals.

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

TM

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
RM

Richard S. Mandigo

Principal · Product Lead, Walk-In
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 TR Mandigo Walk-In, the feasibility platform behind TRM engagements.

Focus
Underwriting · Asset management · Walk-In
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.

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 · Walk-In
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.

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.