Dexter Wood
Senior Managing Director, The Plasencia Group, Inc.
Tampa, FL 33618
Phone (310) 435-3154
Property Types
Hospitality
Markets
Tampa/St Petersburg, Knoxville
Bio
Dexter Wood is an accomplished industry veteran with more than 36 years of diverse global hospitality, finance, and real estate experience. As Senior Managing Director at The Plasencia Group, he leads investment advisory efforts for the firm’s clients, including lodging transactions, developments, and strategic consulting, drawing on his almost four decades of experience at some of the world’s largest hotel and investment companies.
Dexter, who joined The Plasencia Group in 2019, does not come from a brokerage background. Rather he brings to the team a wealth and breadth of experience that includes institutional hotel ownership, management, brand development, finance, strategy, consulting, and more. Spending time in Boston, New York, and Palm Beach, Dexter anchors the Plasencia Group’s Northeastern presence and bolsters its national reach.
He is justifiably proud of having been part of a small team that put together the largest single-asset deal in the history of hotel real estate. As a senior vice president for Hilton, he was instrumental in the sale of the iconic Waldorf Astoria for $1.95 billion, a record not soon to be broken. What’s more, the team reinvested $1.8 billion of the proceeds in five hotels to facilitate a like-kind exchange transaction, thus avoiding capital gains taxes — and they did so in less than a month.
At Hilton, Dexter was Senior Vice President and Global Head of Development and Real Estate Finance and charged with governing the allocation of capital to drive new unit growth, brand expansion, advancement of the timeshare and management business, and value creation opportunities at owned properties. He led an international team of 50 professionals based in the US, London, Dubai and Singapore. In 2017 he transitioned to Senior Vice President – Investments at Park Hotels & Resorts following Hilton’s spin-off of Park and Hilton Grand Vacations, which created three independent publicly traded companies.
Dexter spent most of the 2000s as senior vice president of global feasibility & portfolio analysis at Host Hotels, the world’s largest hotel real estate investment trust. Prior to that, he was director of financial advisory services/hospitality and real estate for PriceWaterhouseCoopers in New York. He began his career with Hospitality Valuation Services (HVS).
Dexter grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts and attended boarding school in New England. From there, he matriculated at Cornell University, where he started off studying chemical engineering. Finding that avenue unsuitable, Dexter, who bartended during summers and in his spare time, made the cut at Cornell’s prestigious School of Hotel Administration, earning a bachelor’s degree. He has remained active with the school ever since and is extremely proud to have attended the graduation of his daughter as a member of the Hotel School’s class of 2023.
Dexter has also served on the Advisory Board for the Hotel School’s Center for Real Estate Finance and the Center for Hospitality Research. He was a member of the Hotel Development Council at the Urban Land Institute and is an Executive Board Member of the Boy Scouts of America.
Dexter is an avid golfer, foodie, and wine enthusiast — both in the kitchen and as a restaurant guest.
Education
