Mr. Sims: Started by my father in 1957 with the purchase of a 12-room motel in College Park, Md., the company is in its 53rd year of business. During the 1980s, the company expanded into multi-unit operations for its own account. In the early 1990s the company expanded its activities to include third-party institutional management for lender clients. In the middle-1990s, the company expanded into Virginia, North Carolina and points south. In 2004 we decided it would be a good idea to take the company public. The focus of that was to continue to grow our company. We needed access to capital that was beyond what the normal community bank would be willing to lend. And what we found over the years is that when you get in the good times, the lenders are perfectly willing to lend on a repositioning of a hotel asset. But in the bad times, like we're in now, the spigot's cut off and there is no access to capital. That was the main reason we went public at the very end of 2004, and we're just coming up on our fifth year anniversary as a public company this year. When we went public, we had six assets and 1,300 rooms, and we've basically doubled the size of that portfolio in five years. We've had very slow growth, judicious growth, as a result of market conditions. We had the opportunity to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital when we went public, and we decided that wasn't the way to go because at the time the market was overheated. And if we had the capital, what were we going to do with it? I mean, the only thing that we could do with it would be to make unprofitable investments. So we elected to not take the capital, essentially paid off all our debt and put a line of credit in place, and that line of credit has been used for our growth. And so it's a little different strategy, a very conservative strategy. But now we're going to be the beneficiary of our conservative approach because while a lot of our peer group is having all kinds of financial difficulties, we're actually seeing growth in our portfolio. And the main reason for that growth is because our basis in our hotels is considerably lower than most.
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