Law360: Hotel Sector Navigates Uneven Recovery in 2025

Jim Butler, co-chair of JMBM’s Global Hospitality Group®, was recently quoted in the Law360 article, “Hotel Sector Navigates Uneven Recovery in 2025.” The article discusses the issues that made the biggest impact on the hospitality sector this year.

“I think this year will stand out, maybe not [as] the first year ever, but certainly the first year in a long time when you have to look at the investment opportunity or value almost corner by corner and certainly hotel by hotel,” Butler told Law360.

Labor costs, which have been on the rise for a while, are probably having the biggest impact on hotels’ costs, with Butler noting that with certain places, such as California, moving quickly toward big minimum wage increases, hotels could be forced to raise rates.

“At an industrywide level, I think that there’s a day of reckoning coming with the consumer having to accept a much higher cost for lodging,” Butler said. “Because I think the industry has absorbed costs internally and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed on expenses, but the labor cost, for example, somebody has to pay for that.”

Butler also pointed to a resurgence in financing from the EB-5 investment visa program. “It only works on, let me say, on great projects, but great projects had trouble with financing before. We think it’s a breakthrough now, in terms of EB-5 being reestablished as a reliable source of capital,” he said.

Read the full article: Hotel Sector Navigates Uneven Recovery in 2025 (subscription required).