Organizers of last week’s Hunter Hotel Investment Conference honored one of the hotel industry’s dynamic, but low-profile entrepreneurs: Bruce White of White Lodging Services. White was recipient of the conference’s second Award for Excellence and Inspiration. White, who is founder, chairman and CEO of the Indiana-based owner, developer and operator, accepted the award in his usual engaging and self-effacing manner.

In accepting his Award for Excellence and Inspiration, Bruce White pleaded for greater involvement in government affairs.

Rather than talk at length about his considerable personal accomplishments, White chose to plead with the audience of 1,000-plus hotel executives to get more involved in government affairs. It was fitting since Choice Hotels President & CEO Steve Joyce made the presentation. Joyce is rapidly becoming one of the industry’s most vocal lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

“When the economy stumbled, I realized how important our jobs and the number of jobs our industry creates—not just hotel jobs but construction jobs and jobs with vendor companies,” said White. “We need to get our legislators to look at us not as hotel people but as job creators and to stop doing things counterproductive to job creation.”

In recounting the history of his firm, White disclosed one of the roots of his success: the family dinner table. His father, Dean, took over his father’s billboard firm, growing it from an $11,000-a-year business to become the largest billboard company in the world, White Advertising Services. “The conversation at dinner generally was about how to build a business,” he said. “Also, we had drilled into us Depression-era values like hard work and stick-to-it-ness.”

While Dean While got into the hotel business in the late 1960s with a Holiday Inn he built along the just-opened I-65 in Indiana, White Lodging wasn’t formed until 1985, when Bruce, fresh from a stint with Hyatt Hotels following college, formed a management company to turn around one of his father’s money-losing properties. The company grew quickly and today owns and/or operates 154 hotels in 18 states. In 2006, it sold a 100-property portfolio to RLJ Development for $1.7 billion. The firm recently opened its crowning achievement, a 1,005-room JW Marriott in downtown Indianapolis that’s part of a $450-million complex of five Marriott-branded properties near the city’s convention center.

The mood at last week’s Hunter Conference was upbeat, but cautious as owners and operators in attendance recognize improving industry fundamentals along with a sluggish financing climate and a backlog of distressed hotel assets. Here are some snapshots of conference conversation:

• Jan Freitag of STR and Mark Woodworth of PKF Hospitality Research gave messages very similar to their industry performance presentations at the ALIS conference in January. As Freitag summed up, new hotel supply is not an issue, demand is very strong for hotels but ADR rate growth has yet to materialize. His facts: For the 12 months ending in January, demand was up 8.0%, a record; supply rose 1.8%, versus a long-term annual average of 2.3%; the pipeline of new hotel projects is down 17% from a year ago; and rates only increased .6%.

PKF’s Mark Woodworth says hotel cap rates will top eight percent through 2012.

• Woodworth gave his forecast for hotel capitalization rates: 8.2% this year, 8.8% next year and 8.6% in 2012. By contrast, the cap rate in 2010 was 7.9%.

• Carlson Hotels executive Nancy Johnson said while it hasn’t happened yet this time, every lodging downturn generates a “great new idea. I don’t know what it will be this time,” she said, “but I see a faster pace of innovation ahead for the industry.”

• Similarly, Mit Shah of Noble Investment predicted higher and lower peaks and valleys for the industry with faster intervals in between. As example, he said during a panel at the ALIS conference in early 2010, two out of nine people on the IREFAC panel predicted industry RevPAR would turn positive that year, with the rest predicting 2011. In reality, RevPAR began to rise in March 2010 and has continued to climb.

• Jim O’Shaughnessy of Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers provided insight into how deep some hotel values fell in the recent downturn. He says the firm’s portfolio lost 40% of its value, although it’s already recovered one-fourth of it. Hotels in its portfolio in gateway cities have regained half of the value they lost.

• When it comes to increasing rates, a hotel company is only as good as its weakest rate manager, said Naveen Kakaria, president & CEO of Hersha Hospitality Management. “Owners need to ask their revenue managers to be more disciplined. If that happens, we’ll all have a great 2011,” he said.

• Noble Investment’s Shah said hotel owners need to recalculate what they place in reserve for capital expenditures. Instead of three or four percent, which was an industry rule of thumb for years, “you need to put seven or eight percent aside for CapEx, particularly if you plan to hold assets for 10 to 20 years. And of that seven or eight percent, one and a half percent needs to be spent on technology-related CapEx items.”