The right brain of Left Lane: A real estate firm you may not have heard of is bringing the noise

There’s a fraternal quality to Left Lane Development. Its four partners all graduated together from Colgate University, which, although located in New York, is miles away from where the investment company is now headquartered: Manhattan. And though Left Lane calls the island home, it’s making its mark in markets well outside it. 

Left Lane is not all Cornell grads. The vertically integrated company today employs 22 people and has its own operating arm in conjunction with Highgate, one of the largest third-party operators in the country. The company was launched in the throes of the pandemic, but, as Managing Partner Jon Kully related, it was something Left Lane leaned into. In fact, it made hay. “It was awful,” he said of the period. But there was also opportunity. 

The pandemic upended quotidian life, closing workplaces and making large gatherings verboten. Even when life reached some normalcy a couple years on, the world was irrevocably changed, where the five-day workweek dwindled or remained a work-from-home situation. This is where Left Lane saw its chance. 

“We knew that Class B office was the worst hit,” said Kully. Class B office buildings are a rung below Class A properties in terms of overall quality, amenities, location and, often, age, but are still functional. At the same time, ground-up development costs swelled making acquisitions and conversions an easier way to grow. Simultaneously, many hotel owners were on life support, having depleted FF&E reserves to pay down debt as revenue dried up. “We knew there was a moat around new hospitality offerings and the older, tired assets lost their ability to renovate,” Kully said. “How could we enter that space cost effectively and exclusively?” 

Left Lane turned to science and data, identifying markets, mostly secondary pockets, to consider investment, cities like Austin or Tampa, 12 markets altogether. They did what no one was doing at the time: hopped on empty airplanes and got to work. 

Stalking Assets 

The hunt was for well-located office buildings with floor plates suitable to be converted to the shallower nature of hotels; things like operable windows, which can be scant in office buildings. (Some 98% of office buildings can’t be cost effectively converted, Kully noted.) They also needed to have what Kully called iconic facades, which would entitle them to tax credits to defray the redevelopment costs. Last, and maybe most important, “They needed to be bought cheaply,” he said. 

To do this, Left Lane employed a proprietary CMBS model that considered loan maturities and loan health of select buildings and borrowers. Instead of buying assets outright, Left Lane employed a different method. As Kully explained it, owners of a building could run an open sales process and sell, but having owned the asset for decades, it’d depreciate to a negative tax basis. “They’d have to come out of pocket and pay the IRS,” he said. 

There was an alternative. Instead of selling the asset outright, the owners could partner with Left Lane and its fresh capital and create a rate-leading asset that they could be a minority interest holder in. 

An example of Left Lane’s work and strategy is the upcoming 221-room Recess Hotel & Club in Savannha, Ga., being refashioned from the historic Manger building, which overlooks the city’s Johnson Square. (Curiously, before becoming an office building some 40 years ago, it was a hotel.) The hotel, which will not only have guestrooms but a members-only club (a hallmark of Left Lane), co-working space, rooftop pool and restaurant, is slated to open in early 2026. 

Recess is one of two brands developed and operated by Left Lane, the other named Bardo. (Kully calls Recess its lifestyle brand while Bardo is luxury lifestyle.) Up to now, Left Lane’s crown achievement is the 149-room Hotel Bardo in Savannah, Ga., which is part of The Leading Hotels of the World. The two-acre “urban resort” is situated in Forsyth Park, which is older than Central Park in New York and a prime example of the role of landscape architecture and urban planning in the U.S. The hotel is inspired by what Left Lane refers to as the “leisurely luxury” and “retro primetime of glamorous travel” of the 1960s along the Mediterranean coast. (Though similar sounding, the hotel does not get its name from Bridget Bardot.) The flagship hotel from Left Lane also boasts multiple F&B outlets, a spa and, a trademark of Left Lane, the members-only Club Bardo. 

The hotel opened in 2024 and is already the market rate and RevPAR leader, according to Kully. 

Though Hotel Bardo Savannah was not reconstituted from an office, a sister property in Pittsburgh currently under development is. Hotel Bardo Pittsburgh, scheduled to debut in the summer of 2026, is a conversion and adaptive reuse of the existing 40-story art-deco Gulf Tower. The property will have 130 guestrooms and suites, 220 residences, multiple F&B outlets and 10,000 square feet of amenity space. And, on cue, a Club Bardo on the 31st floor. Kully believes the hotel will be the preeminent luxury offering in the city, where, say, if an NFL team is in town to play the Steelers, this is where they will stay. “We’re doing California king beds for the visiting sports teams,” Kully said.  

Eastward, Left Lane is in the midst of a project in Providence, R.I., which will be a Bardo when complete, a conversion of The Turk’s Head Building, which originally was designed in 1913. Beyond the grandeur of the building, constructed of white brick with granite and limestone trimmings and an iconic curved façade, the decision to invest in the building comes from the city’s many demand generators, first and foremost as a locus of educational institutions: Brown University, Providence College, Johnson & Wales, to name just three. “There are 11,500 visiting families each year,” Kully said. 

Other projects, with a farther-out timeline, include a Recess Hotel & Club in Phoenix with a scheduled 2027 opening. The project, which will include 209 rooms and 143 residential units, is an adaptive reuse and expansion of the Phoenix Financial Center, also known as The Punchcard Building. Kully said that the property will have the largest fitness facility in all of Phoenix and an entry lagoon, to boot. 

Rounding out its current lot of five projects is the conversion of the Falls Building in Memphis into multifamily, with no hotel component. 

On My Own  

One thing is clear about Left Lane: It doesn’t mind going at it alone. In fact, it likes it that way. Investing in assets and affixing your own brand to it is not for the sheepish in the era of powerful lodging brands—from Hilton to Marriott—and their seemingly omnipotent loyalty programs. Kully has been there before, having worked on many brand deliveries, including Hilton Brooklyn New York and Perry Lane Hotel, part of Marriott’s Luxury Collection. He has a succinct answer for why he doesn’t work with the brands any longer (one that can’t be printed here), but it comes down to what he calls “uncompelling offerings” and the myriad restrictions that he says are “beyond insanity.” He’s apt to point to brands as merely “aggregators” now, able to swoop up smaller brands or competitors instead of competing on name and service alone.   

One gets the sense from Kully that it’s more than just that. He likes the thrill, the excitement, the satisfaction of creating something whole—and with a background in design, it makes sense. “The process of actualizing and operationalizing the brand is a big deal to us,” he said. “It’s not only the interior design or the architecture; it’s the playlist; it’s the scent; it’s the uniforms; it’s the whole vibe.” 

What he doesn’t like is to be controlled, by brands or by management companies, a combination that he says results in a misalignment of interests, whereby much of the control of an asset is seemingly wrested from owners. “The hotel management agreement essentially gives over control to the operator that doesn’t share [in the risk],” he said. Typically, a manager is paid a percentage on their ability to drive top-line revenue, which doesn’t always equate into bottom-line profit, which is where ownership makes its nut. “Why deal with that friction?” Kully said. It’s why Left Lane struck out on its own and is developing its own brands. 

That intrepid spirit is pervasive. While many developers and brands are focused on acquisitions and repositionings, Left Lane is not shying away from ground-up builds. Details are exiguous as of now, but Left Lane is doing a new-construction Bardo in Bozeman, Mont., which will be hotel and condos, and a project that Kully calls “really neat” because the front side touches Main Street and the backside abuts Yellowstone trailhead.  

Left Lane is nowhere near the scale or AUM of the likes of Blackstone, for instance. To hear it from the aspirational Kully, he doesn’t shy away from any comparisons to the heavyweights of hospitality investment. A mini-Blackstone? “Wouldn’t that be lovely,” Kully said. “We’re trying.”