Highgate Hotels

Investment decisions ultimately sit with co-founder Mahmood Khimji and the firm's senior investment committee. Highgate operates as a privately held family enterprise, so day-to-day capital allocation governance is not publicly documented. The firm integrates asset management deeply with operations, meaning the same team that sources deals also manages the properties post-acquisition.

Highgate functions as both — it is a family-owned enterprise that invests its own capital alongside institutional partners in hotel real estate, while also operating the management platform that runs those hotels. This dual structure means Highgate earns both ownership returns and management fees, a model built deliberately by the Khimji family over four decades.

Highgate sources primarily through long-standing relationships with hotel owners, lenders, and real estate brokers in its core gateway markets. The firm's reputation as an operator capable of turning around underperforming assets gives it access to off-market and distressed opportunities. Public record shows Highgate frequently partners with institutional capital — such as Cerberus Capital Management — to acquire portfolios that require operational expertise alongside equity.

Highgate's investment activity is concentrated exclusively in hospitality real estate. The firm targets full-service, luxury, and select-service hotels across the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe. There is no public record of Highgate investing in office, residential, or industrial assets outside of mixed-use hotel developments.

Highgate concentrates on gateway cities with high barriers to entry — New York, Miami, San Francisco, and Boston in the United States, along with London in Europe and San Juan in the Caribbean. The firm's recent European expansion suggests growing interest in additional Western European urban markets where its owner-operator model can be applied to underperforming hotel assets.

Highgate and Cerberus have partnered on multiple hotel portfolio acquisitions, with Cerberus providing institutional equity and Highgate contributing operational expertise and co-investment capital. In October 2023, the two firms announced a dedicated European hospitality investment platform, formalizing a relationship that had previously been deal-by-deal. Cerberus is Highgate's most visible institutional co-investor.

A standard hotel private equity fund buys hotels and hires a third-party management company like Marriott or Hilton to run them. Highgate instead runs the hotels it owns, employing the general managers, revenue managers, and marketing teams directly. This vertical integration captures the management fee margin that would otherwise flow to an external operator and gives Highgate direct control over guest experience and asset performance.