AGO Hotels

AGO Hotels was founded in the early months of the global Covid-19 pandemic when many large and well-funded tenants took advantage of chaos in the market and stopped paying rents to landlords. Our founder, Viv Watts, was among that unfortunate group of landlords and like many other landlords was being asked to ‘share the pain’ of the toll that the covid-19 pandemic was taking on tenants. Sympathetic to their woes, he attempted to find a solution with the tenant but was asked (and later forced via an insolvency) to accept a substantial loss of rent with no ability to recover this unpaid rent in the future when the tenant’s business was performing well again. This fuelled a quest to create a solution for landlords, by devising a lease structure that would not only be far more resilient to future downturns in trading conditions but would also genuinely align the interests of landlord and tenant by giving the landlords a share in the profits generated by their assets, underpinned by a guaranteed rent.