Graduate Hotels: how Ben Weprin built a college-town hotel brand

Executive overview

Generic chain hotels offer nothing worth remembering. Ben Weprin saw that college towns — places with deep alumni loyalty, rich history, and year-round visitor demand — had no hotel brand built around their identity.

Starting with a dilapidated Days Inn near DePaul University in Chicago, Weprin proved that a story-driven, affordable hotel could outperform a market with no competition. He then replicated the model across college towns under the Graduate Hotels brand, eventually selling the brand to Hilton for over $200 million while retaining ownership of all the properties.

The core insight: constraint and inefficiency are features, not bugs — making every hotel completely unique to its location is hard to copy and impossible to commoditize.

From broker to developer

• Grew up in Dayton, Ohio; father was a commercial real estate broker who modelled hustle and grit through hard times
• Started as a broker at Marcus & Millichap, eventually opening an informal Nashville office with a college friend
• First development deal: a five-story building in downtown Nashville, converted to cash-flowing retail after a condo plan collapsed when steel prices quadrupled
• Joined Larry Levy's firm in Chicago; a trip to scout a hotel in Cabo San Lucas sparked a passion for hospitality
• Helped grow Auberge Resorts under Levy's umbrella, sourcing luxury acquisitions until the 2008 financial crisis

Buying into Auberge — and learning the hard way

• When Levy decided to sell his ~25% stake in Auberge (valued at ~$8M), Weprin pitched himself as the buyer with almost no cash
• Raised the money from 15 investors, including a Dayton dermatologist; Levy rolled in remaining equity as a vote of confidence
• The Raleigh Hotel deal in Miami Beach — an iconic Esther Williams property — was lined up with RAO's restaurant as operator; investors ousted Weprin from the project months in
• Loss of the Raleigh deal was a pivotal lesson: who you partner with matters as much as the asset

The Hotel Lincoln breakthrough

• Spotted a vacant, dilapidated Days Inn near DePaul in Lincoln Park, Chicago — no competitive set, high barriers to entry
• Renovated it to reflect the neighbourhood: Abraham Lincoln references, rooftop bar named after Lincoln's bodyguard, local art and flea-market finds covering the walls
• Partnered with Angelo Gordon and a local construction expert to fund and execute the build
• Hotel Lincoln opened and "crushed" immediately — guests and locals both responded to the authentic neighbourhood story
• Proved the model: find a neighbourhood with a distinctive identity, remove bad product, replace with story-driven hospitality at an accessible price point

Building the Graduate brand

• Recognised that university markets shared Lincoln Park's key traits: passionate community ownership, year-round visitor demand (alumni, parents, prospective students, weddings, camps), and no credible hotel brand
• New York and LA were too expensive; Ann Arbor, Michigan convinced Weprin — reluctantly, as a Buckeye — that college towns had the energy and loyalty to anchor a brand
• Named the brand Graduate; motto: "we are all students" — aspirational, affordable, and nostalgic
• First property opened fall 2014 in Tempe, Arizona (near ASU), followed quickly by Athens, Georgia and Oxford, Mississippi
• Early design mistake: a red solo cup painting in the Oxford model room prompted Weprin to pull it — then, years later, he realised the team had instinctively captured the right spirit; he had been taking it too seriously

The design process

• Built a "writer's table" process: gather alumni from multiple generations, have open conversations about what made each school distinctive
• Identified a central character — real or imagined — to anchor each hotel's design and story
  • Chapel Hill: Michael Jordan
  • Nashville: Dolly Parton
  • Knoxville: Peyton Manning
  • Auburn: Bo Jackson
  • Eugene: Phil Knight and Steve Prefontaine (Nike as a metaphor for ambition)
• Eugene example: front desk styled as a vintage shoe store, track-and-field motifs throughout, colours and textures drawn from the surrounding forest
• Each hotel is completely different — deliberately inefficient, but impossible to replicate at scale by competitors
• The goal: "create a new memory in an old place that already feels familiar"

Growth, COVID, and the Hilton deal

• By 2020: 4,600 rooms, ~$72M in revenue, 15 hotels open, 15–17 under development, 2,200 employees
• COVID took revenue to zero almost overnight; 2,000 of 2,200 employees were laid off
• Stayed committed to each community — opened doors to first responders and stranded students, kept skeleton crews in place
• Recovery came well into 2021; 2022 saw a spike as students and families flooded back to campuses they had never visited in person
• To service expensive emergency debt taken on during COVID, Weprin called Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta — who had previously told him Graduate was the one brand he'd consider acquiring
• Hilton paid over $200 million for the Graduate brand rights in March 2024; AJ Capital retained ownership and operation of all properties
• Hilton can now franchise the brand globally; AJ Capital benefits from Hilton's distribution, loyalty points, and revenue management

What he'd do differently

• The Raleigh deal taught him to vet partners as carefully as assets
• The solo cup moment taught him to trust his team's instincts and stay true to the actual nostalgia — not a sanitised version of it
• Attributes most of his success to luck: the right mentors, the right wife, the right timing on markets
• On grind vs. luck: "You have to go to the store and cash the lottery ticket" — awareness and persistence matter, but opportunity is mostly circumstance