The National Association of Condo Hotel Owners (NACHO) was founded in 2006 and is, as described on their website, “a non-profit trade association, representing the entire life cycle of the condo hotel segment from interested individuals and buyers, developers, supporting trades, and the individual unit owners.” Their goals include educating the marketplace about condo hotels, increasing the information transparency around hotel condos, providing non-biased evaluations of market participants and general advocacy for maturation and development of the condo hotel industry. Intended to be a partnership between the industry and condo hotel owners, NACHO’s membership runs the spectrum from hotel developers, lenders (to both builders and buyers), condo hotel home owners’ associations, management companies, real estate agents, other related service providers to individual condo owners.

NACHO’s activities include promoting an industry-wide code of business ethics, third-party evaluations of projects and participants (through their NACHO Seal of Approval program), and hosting a business listings and a comprehensive directory of condo hotels in the US at their website (http://www.nacho.us). Other usual features at the NACHO website include:

• A condo price index with median prices for individual markets and US regions
• A comprehensive directory of US condo hotels
• A basic calculator to estimate condo cost of ownership and cash flows
• Business listings of condo industry participants
• Popular destination rankings, and
• NACHO’s industry trend information and analysis

One of NACHO’s main benefits to the industry is to fill the information void created by SEC regulations which limit the degree to which developers can market condo hotels as investments. Under these guidelines, and with an industry history of lawsuits from individuals who felt that investment “promises” were broken, developers as a rule do not directly provide sufficient data to project property appreciation much less income stream. In so far as NACHO can become a trusted, impartial repository for aggregated market data and developer or project evaluations, it will serve as a valuable and necessary facilitator of industry transactions and thereby overall growth.

Given NACHO’s modest membership dues (as low as $50 annually), individual condo owners and prospective buyers should strongly consider participating in this association as a way to evaluate a specific condo hotel purchase, assuming that the profile of that development is in the NACHO database.

We do not recommend that any prospective buyer rely solely on what a condo salesperson is telling them. Due your own due diligence. The NACHO website is one place to start.