The Shah Brothers Would Like You to Sleep With Them

“Harrisburg did not see much brown skin then,” Hasu says. “I could understand the feeling of some of the landlords. It took us about 20 days—she must have gone to maybe 40, 50 apartments.” (Now, they’ve been in Harrisburg for 42 years; the mayor named a street Hersha Drive.)

To supplement his income, Hasu began buying foreclosed homes, fixing and flipping them. The family helped. “I was in third grade,” Jay remembers, “and I got to be on a roof swinging a hammer.” When the plan to buy a drug factory in India fell through, the Shahs took the money they’d saved and bought that first motel, just before the nuclear meltdown. “No one could go near there for three weeks,” Hasu recalls. “But then the motel started doing very well, because a lot of maintenance people were around.”

They used the cash flow to buy another motel, and onward and upward it went. Hasu would make deals. Hersha would manage the properties. Hasu named the company to honor his wife in 1984, after they bought their first real hotel in Harrisburg, ejected the drug dealers and hookers, and changed its name to the Riverfront Inn.

There’s a statistic that’s kind of astonishing: According to the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, at least 40 percent of the hotels and motels in the United States are owned by Indian-Americans—even though they make up less than one percent of the American population. One explanation holds that established Indian hoteliers assist newcomers with small loans and expertise. Hersha Shah offers this: “Hospitality is a big thing in India culturally. Our parents taught us that guests are God-sent.” Hindu scripture, she says, has a proverb: Athiti devo bhava, “The guest is God.”

JAY AND NEIL weren’t predestined to join the company. Jay studied hotel administration at Cornell and got MBA and law degrees at Temple, then went to Washington to work for Senator John Heinz. Neil studied at Wharton, got a Harvard MBA, and worked for a consultant. They had options. But as Jay says: “When something has your mother’s name, you’re vested in it.”

Philadelphia seemed an ideal base for their ambitions, triangulated amid New York, D.C. and Harrisburg (where the company remains headquartered) and poised for growth during the 1990s Rendell Renaissance. They took the buying-and-selling part of their business public in 1999 as Hersha Hospitality Trust. It’s a real-estate investment trust, a REIT, like a mutual fund for real estate. The cash from the IPO funded major expansion.

“We bought maybe 60 hotels,” Neil Shah explains, “really clustered in the four cities we knew well, where Jay and I really felt local: Boston, New York, Philadelphia and D.C. They’re four markets we’ve really lived in, not just bought groceries in, but we’ve, like, met girls there.”

Today, the Hersha corporate structure is its own sort of ecosystem. Three Hersha companies own hotels in some capacity, but each has its own focus. The REIT buys and sells hotels.

The Hyatt48Lex is owned not by the REIT but by a private division, Hersha Development Corp., which mostly builds hotels to sell but owns a few. Hersha Hospitality Management staffs hotels (for Hersha and other owners), but also owns some. For a few years, the Hersha REIT lent money to Hersha Development, which would build a hotel and sell it to the Hersha REIT. Sometimes, the Hersha management company would get the contract to run the hotel. This is what happens when you send your kids to business school.

Neil hunts for acquisitions, while Jay takes the lead making Hersha’s institutional investors comfortable. “They are different, like me and Hasu,” their mother says. “Hasu is a wheeler and dealer, and I am an operator. Same way, Jay manages everything very well, and Neil can make deals. Neil is very contemporary. Jay is more traditional.”

Jay lives in Wynnewood, Neil in Society Hill. (Both are married, with two children.) Each is connected to Philadelphia in his own way: Jay sits on the boards of Temple University and Episcopal Academy, and was on the property development committee of the Please Touch Museum as it moved to Fairmount Park; Neil is on the corporate council of the Constitution Center.

Lately the pair has led the REIT’s “asset recycling” strategy—selling suburban hotels acquired early in the company’s life to buy urban ones. In August, Hersha announced the sale of 18 non-urban hotels for about $155 million. Neil figures the money should be enough for two or three city hotels, where Hersha is making its biggest, potentially riskiest buys.

BACK IN NEW YORK, after the furniture showroom, Jay and I jump into the town car and head just south of Union Square to where, in June, Hersha’s REIT agreed to buy an under-construction luxury hotel for $104 million. Planned for a mid-2012 opening, it will be called the Hyatt Union.

“It’s a big bite,” says David Katz, an industry analyst who follows the Hersha REIT for Jefferies & Co.

Union’s design will blend earthy with modern—a century-old two-story facade wrapped around a glass tower. At the moment, it’s a gutted construction site. Jay waves his hand across the right side of the vast lobby.

“Because we’re so close to Union Square Park, the design intent is to bring an interpretation of the organic elements of the park into the hotel,” he says. “The ceiling treatment is a large oval of fabric over the bar that’s going to have twinkling LED lights, like a nighttime sky. And the chandelier is really an installation of twigs, lit from above so each of them will glow.” As always, though, he soon loops back to the money: “You’re optimizing square footage to create as much revenue in the space as can reasonably be done.” A week later, Jay and Neil give me a tour of the Independent in Philly’s Midtown Village, which we all know as the Gayborhood. The Independent is part of the first brand that Hersha is creating for itself, the Independent Collection—currently six small hotels around the country that aren’t Hyatts or Marriotts or Hiltons. They also include the NU Hotel in Brooklyn, the rustic Minnewaska Lodge in New York’s Hudson- Valley, and the “shabby chic” Postcard Inn at St. Pete Beach, Florida.

Neil, spearheading the project, calls the indies “hotels where you really feel the soul of the neighborhood.” In the Independent’s lobby are piles of the Philadelphia Weeklyand the Philadelphia Gay News and, in a sunlit atrium, a giant multicolored painting- of Independence Hall.

We get a key to the lounge on the first floor, below the hotel. It’s previously been a succession of gay bars—in fact, until a few weeks prior, it was the Q Lounge. We gather chairs and sit. There must have been a final bash; partly consumed bottles of booze and a pair of white high-top sneakers are on the bar. The Shahs have just finished conducting a “beauty contest” to select a new restaurant for the space, and they reveal to me it’s going to be Mike Stollenwerk’s Fish.

“So you’ll have this wonderful brasserie setting downstairs, and a quiet inn upstairs,” Neil says.

I wonder why they haven’t done more hotel development in Philly.

“Philadelphia’s a very challenging market to develop real estate,” Neil says. During an earlier talk, we stood at the window of the Walnut Street office, overlooking Independence Hall, and Neil pointed to the Hotel Monaco that’s going up at 5th and Chestnut. It’ll probably succeed, he said, “but you needed an out-of-towner to get it done. Because you needed to think it was gonna be cheaper to get done than it is.”

Still, he rattles off a few local projects in search of development: “There’s a lot flying around, from the Philadelphia Inquirer building to the waterfront, the YMCA, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the education building. I think we’ll find an opportunity or two,” he says.

There is pensive silence for a moment. Then I remember to ask: Whatever happened with the $7,500 bench and the $3,000 lamp?

“We did get the bench,” Neil says. Motioning toward his brother, he adds: “He’s not happy about it.”

“We did not get the lamp,” Jay says. “Got a different lamp. Different lamp that will hopefully have a similar impact—at one-third the budget.”