Minas Terlidis sees plenty of hotel opportunities in Europe's most visited cities — not in large new developments but in small, underused buildings across the continent.
Terlidis is co-founder and CEO of Cyprus-based Bohopo, a pan-Europe hotel investment firm that specializes in small boutique hotels. A decade ago, Terlidis began investing in boutique hotels in Athens, and since then he has convinced his equity partners that there's less risk and more flexibility when considering converting existing small buildings into intimate boutique hotels.
The sweet spot is a 20- to 50-room hotel, a number Terlidis said opens up more buildings. Bohopo specializes in repositioning small properties, be they conversions from offices or existing hotels. Terlidis is convinced this is a niche that is under-capitalized and mostly ignored.
“People increasingly want to stay in the heart of a city, in something with intimacy, rather than in a large, standardized hotel,” Terlidis said in an interview with CoStar News Hotels.
Bohopo was founded in 2022 as Terlidis partnered with Oren Saada and Patrick Saada, who were also looking to invest in real estate in Greece.
An emphasis on smaller hotels
The “boutique” concept can mean many different things to different people, but Bohopo’s core focus is small-format, city-center real estate that can be repositioned into service-light boutique hotels, Terlidis said.
“The aim is to build clusters within selected cities, so individual small assets can benefit from shared operational infrastructure,” he said. “Simplicity of operations is central to everything we do. We believe what we do remains under-capitalized rather than crowded, and that is our opportunity.”
That opportunity thrives due to the persistent nature of Europe’s fragmented hotel industry. Many well-located European hotel assets remain in private hands, with a large share of them being family-owned boutique hotels in prime locations that require renovation, Terlidis said.
“The older generation often lacks the appetite to reinvest, and the next generation frequently does not want to run a hotel, so there is a steady pipeline of motivated sellers,” he said.
Institutional investors generally cannot buy these hotels one by one because the ticket sizes are too small and — depending on how you approach operations — they often become complex transactions, he said. Smaller buyers are constrained by financing, expertise and the lack of a platform that can cluster multiple assets to improve returns.
“The fundamentals, prime urban real estate and tourism-supported cash flow are strong, but the market is fragmented and hard to access. Bohopo exists to bridge that gap,” Terlidis said.
Gateway cities across Europe are Bohopo’s prime targets, but it is also seeing scope in well-connected, culturally rich urban markets that have the correct demand fundamentals, he said. For instance, traveler curiosity is steadily directing demand towards culturally authentic cities such as Porto, Portugal.
“Our 20- to 50-room model fits those markets naturally, and expansion is far easier where we already have an anchor: from Milan into Verona, Turin, Genoa or Bologna, or from Paris into Marseille, Nice and Lyon. Three or four properties of 30 rooms each is a safer deployment in smaller cities than a single, over-100-room asset,” he said, adding Bohopo is still cautious when deciding to invest in a new market.
Bohopo currently has 11 hotels open or in development across five European cities — Athens, Brussels, Milan, Paris and Porto, with eight of them being operational right now.
“We are actively looking across both our established and new markets, as well as in secondary French and Italian cities and parts of Central and Eastern Europe,” he said. “London is a market we continue to monitor closely. It has the fundamentals we look for, from deep visitor demand to constrained central supply and a significant stock of smaller hotels.”
Asset value is generated at Bohopo's acquisition targets in three ways, Terlidis said.
“Through permitting expertise and construction; through optimizing the room layout to get the most out of the floor plan, and through redesigning the asset as a genuinely high-quality boutique hotel. Doing that well across five jurisdictions, each with its own planning, heritage and construction rules, is a real barrier for larger players. That difficulty is precisely where we believe disciplined execution can create value,” he said.
But clustering and consolidation are key, Terlidis added.
“We deliberately build clusters of small hotels rather than chasing a single large asset, and that gives us three levels of diversification,” he said. “The first is geographic, by balancing higher-growth markets such as Athens and Porto with more mature, lower-volatility markets such as Paris and Milan.
“The second is within each city, by spreading our position across several small hotels so that a localized disruption affects only one asset rather than the whole city portfolio. The third is by brand, since each hotel carries a distinct identity appealing to different guests. In portfolio terms, the aim is to reduce volatility without diluting the return profile. A diversified cluster of smaller assets can be more resilient than relying on one larger property.”
Terlidis is convinced clusters of hotels perform better and offer reduced risk.
“By grouping several small-format, service-light hotels within the same city, Bohopo can share operational infrastructure, management expertise and systems across multiple assets, while preserving the individuality of each property. This helps smaller hotels benefit from efficiencies that would be difficult to achieve on a standalone basis,” he said.
“On the revenue side, a cluster also allows us to offer guests a range of distinctive products within the same market, each shaped around its building, neighborhood and guest profile, rather than relying on one standardized offer. Smaller hotels can also be more responsive from a pricing perspective, especially when demand is strong. In that sense, consolidation works on two levels: Our pan-European platform and infrastructure give us the scale to deploy capital, while the cluster format itself challenges the assumption that larger hotels are inherently more efficient.”
Terlidis said Bohopo is not trying to force a trend into a market that cannot support it, but rather to follow travel and hotel demand where the fundamentals are already moving in the right direction.
“Our small-format model is particularly well suited to those cities, because it allows us to build scale gradually through a cluster of boutique assets rather than relying on a single large hotel,” he added.
Mature thinking
Terlidis and his partners take a conservative approach to leverage and structure financing on a market-by-market basis, with many of the assets Bohopo pursues being held privately or in family hands and where certainty of execution is important.
“Having patient equity behind the platform allows us to move decisively when the right opportunity arises, while using debt selectively and prudently as assets mature,” he said. “More broadly, this is still a niche that institutional capital struggles to access directly, because the assets are too small to buy individually.
“Ultimately, the objective is to create an institutional-grade platform that allows larger investors to access this part of the market in a disciplined, scalable way.”
Debt for such an initiative is available, although pricing and terms vary significantly by market, he said.
“We remain selective and conservative in how we use debt,” Terlidis said. “As the platform grows, we will continue to assess the most appropriate financing options while maintaining the same disciplined approach to leverage.”
He said risk is mitigated by buying at the right price and delivering developments on time and on budget.
“Getting them right is what protects us when the wider environment turns. Beyond that, almost everything in our model is designed for resilience,“ he said. “Small assets and three levels of diversification mean no single event can damage the whole portfolio, and a lean and disciplined cost base gives us room to breathe when revenue softens.
“The objective is always to be ready to manage the downside while remaining positioned to capture upside. It is also embedded in how we make decisions. In our investment committee, we spend more time testing the downside than celebrating the upside. That discipline is central to how we protect the platform and manage risk.“
Terlidis said his prior experience as a civil engineer and working alongside private equity real estate funds has been pivotal in shaping his thinking.
“I felt the real opportunity was not in any single hotel but in aggregating city-center boutique hotels into a coherent investment product. In effect, this meant turning a fragmented and historically difficult-to-access segment of the market into a new, investable asset class,” he said.
An education in engineering helps to break a problem down so that it can be worked through methodically, with a full respect for any constraints, Terlidis said.
“That has been valuable in everything from permits and construction to underwriting. I supplemented it with business studies, but what shaped me as much as any qualification was living in different countries and being exposed to different cultures, ownership structures and ways of working. That matters enormously in our business, because we are constantly negotiating with families and local owners across very different markets,” Terlidis said.