We believe that we are able to create significant value in our portfolio by utilizing our management's extensive experience and our innovative asset management strategies.

Our senior management team has an established broad network of hotel industry contacts and relationships, including relationships with hotel owners, financiers, operators, project managers and contractors and other key industry participants.

We use our broad network to maximize the value of our hotels. Under the regulations governing REITs, we are required to engage a hotel manager through one of our subsidiaries to manage each of our hotels pursuant to a management agreement. Our philosophy is to negotiate management agreements that give us the right to exert significant influence over the management of our properties, annual budgets and all capital expenditures, and then to use those rights to continually monitor and improve the performance of our properties. We cooperatively partner with the managers of our hotels in an attempt to increase operating results and long-term asset values at our hotels. In addition to working directly with the personnel at our hotels, our senior management team also has long-standing professional relationships with our hotel managers' senior executives, and we work directly with these senior executives to improve the performance of our portfolio.

We believe we can create significant value in our portfolio through innovative asset management strategies such as rebranding, renovating and repositioning. We are committed to regularly evaluating our portfolio to determine if we can employ these value-added strategies at our hotels. During 2006 and 2007, we completed a significant amount of capital reinvestment in our hotels—completing projects that ranged from room renovations (Courtyard New York Manhattan/Midtown East, Los Angeles Airport Marriott, Bethesda Marriott Suites, Orlando Airport Marriott, Frenchman's Reef & Morning Star Marriott Beach Resort and Westin Atlanta  Perimeter North) to a total renovation and repositioning of the hotel (Torrance Marriott South Bay and the Oak Brook Hills Marriott Resort) to the addition of new meeting space, spa or restaurant repositioning (Westin Boston Waterfront, Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile and Griffin Gate Marriott Resort). By the end of 2008, we expect to have fully renovated nearly all of the hotels in our portfolio. In connection with our planned renovations and repositionings, our senior management team and our asset managers are individually committed to completing these renovations on time, on budget and with minimum disruption at our hotels.

A core tenet of our asset management strategy is to leverage national hotel brands. We strongly believe in the value of powerful national brands because we believe that they are able to produce incremental revenue and profits compared to similar unbranded hotels. Dominant national hotel brands typically have very strong reservation and reward systems and sales organizations, as a result, all of our hotels are operated under a brand owned by one of the top three national brand companies (Marriott, Starwood or Hilton) and all but two of the hotels are operated by the brand company directly. Generally, we are interested in acquiring only those hotels that are operated under a nationally recognized brand or can be converted into a branded hotel.

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