Flacks Group closed on the 196-room DoubleTree by Hilton Augusta in Georgia, immediately transferring management to StepStone Hospitality. The transaction price was not disclosed. The hotel sits four miles from Augusta National Golf Club, a location detail that matters eleven months of the year and becomes critical during Masters week in April.
The seller was not named in the announcement. StepStone, a Birmingham-based operator with seventy-one properties across eighteen states, now manages the property under its existing Hilton franchise agreement. The DoubleTree brand occupies the middle tier of Hilton's portfolio—above Hampton, below full-service—targeting extended-stay business travelers and weekend leisure demand. Augusta's market absorbs corporate traffic from Fort Eisenhower military base, regional medical facilities, and light manufacturing. The Masters tournament compresses an entire quarter's worth of revenue into one week, creating cash-flow lumps that complicate underwriting but attract buyers who understand the pattern.
Flacks Group operates as a family office–backed acquisition vehicle focused on select-service and extended-stay assets in the Southeast. The firm typically holds properties for five to seven years, relying on third-party operators rather than building internal management infrastructure. StepStone's portfolio skews toward Hilton and Marriott flags in markets with populations under 500,000—Dothan, Alabama; Texarkana, Texas; Florence, South Carolina—where brand recognition drives occupancy and operational intensity remains manageable. The DoubleTree Augusta fits that profile. The property includes 3,500 square feet of meeting space, a courtyard pool, and a restaurant lease that runs through 2027, according to previous listing materials.
This marks StepStone's third management contract signed since October 2024, following a Courtyard by Marriott in Pensacola and a Residence Inn in Mobile. The firm's expansion pace has accelerated as family offices and regional private equity shops acquire stabilized hotel assets but lack appetite for direct operating exposure. Management fees typically run 3% to 4% of gross revenue, with incentive structures tied to RevPAR index performance against the competitive set. For a property generating $6 million to $8 million in annual revenue—a reasonable estimate for a 196-room DoubleTree in Augusta—base fees land between $180,000 and $320,000 annually, before performance bonuses.
The Augusta market posted 62% occupancy and $89 average daily rate through the first three quarters of 2024, per STR data, lagging the national select-service average by four percentage points on occupancy but tracking close on rate. The DoubleTree competes directly with a Marriott Courtyard, a Hyatt Place, and two independent extended-stay properties within a two-mile radius. Fort Eisenhower—formerly Fort Gordon—employs roughly 30,000 military and civilian personnel, generating steady mid-week demand that smooths the revenue curve between April's Masters spike and the rest of the calendar.
Operators and allocators should watch whether StepStone bundles this property into a future management portfolio sale or REIT transaction. The firm has historically aggregated fee streams before selling management contracts in bulk to larger platforms. Flacks Group's typical hold period suggests a 2029 to 2031 exit window, likely to another family office or a programmatic buyer seeking Hilton-flag exposure in non-gateway markets. Meanwhile, Hilton's franchise development pipeline shows four new DoubleTree properties slated for the Southeast in 2025, all in similar tertiary markets, indicating continued confidence in the brand's unit economics at this tier.
The transaction closed in late March 2025, three weeks before Masters week check-ins begin, allowing StepStone to capture the property's highest-revenue period under its management.
The takeaway
A stabilized Hilton-flag asset changing hands in a secondary market, signaling continued family-office appetite for predictable select-service cash flows.
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