By: Natalie Johnson
Hospitality development tends to be told as a story about vision: someone sees a stretch of coastline, imagines what could sit on it, and raises the money to make it real. Kristyl Nelson, COO of Kindah Enterprises, the parent company of Kindah Capital Group, and who leads investment activity at Kindah, has been operating in Negril, Jamaica since 2006, argues that this sequence is backwards, and that treating capital as the last step of a development is precisely why so many projects underperform in their markets. Her conviction about High Life Resort & Spa, a proposed 65-acre hospitality and residential master plan on Jamaica’s West End with roughly 1,800 feet of beachfront access, did not begin with a spreadsheet. It began with two decades of serving guests and building businesses in a market she watched evolve into an international destination. What changed, she says, is not her belief in the location – it is her understanding of what has to sit underneath it.
Capital Structure Is Part Of The Design
The most consequential idea Nelson has taken from High Life is also the one most likely to be ignored by developers who think of financing as a procurement exercise. “Capital isn’t simply something you raise to execute a development,” she says. “Capital is part of the development strategy itself.” The type of capital matters. So do the timing and the structure, as well as the way each source works alongside the others. High Life’s current strategy contemplates phased development and incorporates branded-residence sales as one component of the broader capital approach, but Nelson is pointedly uninterested in using financial returns as a selling point. “The specific numbers aren’t the point,” she says. “What’s more interesting to me is the thinking behind them.”
That thinking produces a rule most developers would struggle to apply in practice, because it requires the capital conversation to begin before the architecture is settled. “You don’t design the project and then figure out the capital,” Nelson says. “The capital structure is part of the project design.” Her reasoning follows the sequence she has watched unfold on a development of this scale: land, entitlements, infrastructure, engineering, architecture, construction, operations, brand relationships, financing, residential sales, positioning, and timing. Every one of those decisions eventually touches capital. “A design decision can become an operating decision,” she says. “And an operating decision ultimately becomes a capital decision.” Where those links are made late, they are made expensively. At High Life, significant master-planning, architectural, and engineering work is already complete. The design allows two distinct hospitality concepts: an ultra-luxury villa and branded-residence experience and a larger lifestyle resort totaling 330 hotel and residential keys to share selected infrastructure, service access, and back-of-house functions. That is a design decision with a capital rationale embedded in it.
Conviction Only Counts When Something Supports It
Developers are rewarded for believing in things before anyone else does, which is exactly why the industry tolerates so much unsupported belief. Nelson does not dispute that conviction is the entry requirement. “You have to believe something can exist long before everyone else can see it,” she says. Her operating history in Negril is the source of hers. She and her partners saw something in the West End before there was a master plan or a capital strategy attached to it, recognizing that lower-density positioning and scarce oceanfront land offered a different proposition from the traditional resort corridor along Seven Mile Beach. “Sometimes you understand the value of a place because you’ve spent enough time there to see what others may not see yet,” she says.
The discipline she has added is the insistence that conviction be paired with something that can be checked. A compelling vision needs strong economics behind it. Belief in a destination needs an understanding of the demand supporting it. An exceptional team needs an execution strategy. Upside needs a clear explanation of what is creating it. “That’s where underwriting has become increasingly important in the way I think,” Nelson says. “It’s not about making the biggest projection possible. It’s about understanding the relationship between the market, the product, the operation, and the capital, and creating alignment between all four.” That reframes underwriting from a gatekeeping function into a design tool, which is a materially different proposition for anyone who treats the model as something the finance team produces after the fact. It also shifts the questions she asks about a market. Jamaica offers a globally recognized tourism brand, an established hospitality economy, and direct international access through Montego Bay, one of the Caribbean’s important gateways. None of that, on its own, satisfies her. “Increasingly, I don’t think only about whether a market is attractive,” she says. “I ask: what is our reason for being there? What can we create that belongs in that market?”
The Asset And The Business Are One Thesis
Nelson’s operator instinct shows most clearly in her refusal to let the real estate and the business be evaluated separately, a separation that is standard practice across much of the industry. “A resort isn’t simply a beautiful piece of real estate,” she says. “There’s a business operating inside of it every day.” People, service, food and beverage, wellness, sales, marketing, maintenance, technology, and guest experience are all part of the package. Each of those is a daily cost, a daily revenue opportunity, and a daily test of whether the physical asset was built to support what has to happen inside it. “The asset has to support the business, and the business has to strengthen the asset,” she says. That is the logic behind High Life’s increasingly integrated plan, which brings hospitality, residences, amenities, and shared infrastructure together rather than running them as adjacent projects.
The cumulative effect has been a change in what impresses her, which is a more useful measure of professional development than a change in what she says. Scale is exciting; thoughtful structure is more interesting. A compelling vision matters; a clear path to execution matters as much. “Raising capital is important,” Nelson says. “Deploying it intelligently is what creates value.” She now looks for opportunities where a strong underlying market, a differentiated concept, real operating expertise, thoughtful real estate, the right partners, and a purpose-built capital strategy arrive together, because she no longer believes any of them function independently. “When those pieces come together, capital becomes much more than the money required to build something,” she says. “It becomes a tool for turning a compelling idea into an enduring asset.”
Follow Kristyl Nelson on LinkedIn for more insights on hospitality development, capital structuring, and operating-led real estate investment.
