Former Hotel Analyst Built AI to Fix the Problem He Lived Every Day | Ziggy Hallgarten E71
The Hotel Investor Playbook
Startup challenges: focus over feature lust
Ziggy discusses the danger of building for everyone and the need to nail one ICP and process first.
If you're still tracking your hotel pipeline in Excel and spending two hours screening each deal, you're working harder than you need to. Ziggy Hallgarten lived with that frustration as an analyst, so he built the solution.
In this episode, you'll get fresh market insights from the ALIS Conference, learn how AI can cut your deal analysis time dramatically, and hear what the entrepreneurial journey looks like when you're solving a problem you experienced yourself.
A Cornell Hotel School graduate who worked in acquisitions at institutional firms before founding Broome.ai shares what he's seeing in the hotel market, why he left to build his own company, and how AI is transforming the way investors analyze deals. Ziggy Hallgarten bootstrapped his startup after watching teams waste hours on manual workflows, teaching himself to build software using AI tools to automate the deal screening process he knew was broken.
In this episode, you'll discover:
- What the mood was really like at this year's ALIS Conference, and which markets are heating up
- How Broome.ai cuts deal screening from 2 hours down to 30 minutes or less by automating data extraction
- Why Ziggy left his family's hotel business to build his own company from scratch
- Free tools you can use to build software prototypes without any coding knowledge
- Where AI will have the biggest impact on hotels: revenue management and operations
- The biggest mistake founders make: trying to solve every problem instead of focusing on one
- Practical ways hotel investors can start leveraging AI in their workflow today
Whether you're an independent operator trying to compete with bigger shops, curious about where hotel investing is headed, or thinking about starting something of your own, this conversation delivers real insights from someone living on both sides of it.
About Ziggy Hallgarten
Ziggy Hallgarten is the Co-Founder and CEO of Broome, a software company building AI agents that automate the complex administrative workflows of Commercial Real Estate transactions. A graduate of Cornell’s Hotel School, he traces his hospitality roots from folding towels as a 10-year-old pool boy to managing acquisitions for institutions like PGIM Real Estate and family offices like Oliver Companies. Frustrated by the inefficiencies of the deal process, Ziggy transitioned from investor to founder in 2025 to build the solutions he needed as an analyst.
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