Glade Knight

Richmond, Virginia is not where you would expect to find a BYU M.B.A. running one of the larger hotel landlords in the United States, and hotels are not where you would expect the word Apple. Both are true anyway. Glade Knight was born in Utah in 1944, took a bachelor's degree and then an M.B.A. from Brigham Young University's Marriott School, and set up his business a long way from either, at 814 East Main Street in downtown Richmond. Nearly every fund he has run has carried the same name: Cornerstone Realty Income Trust first, then Apple Residential Income Trust, Apple Suites, Apple Hospitality Two and Apple Hospitality Five, then the numbered Apple REITs Six through Ten. His Wikipedia entry calls Apple Hospitality "the latest of 10 Apple programs". The programs sold shares to retail investors through brokers, bought select-service hotels under Marriott and Hilton flags, and when a program matured, sold it or merged it into the next. The company he chairs today owns 216 hotels with about 29,500 rooms in 37 states and the District of Columbia, 114 of them Hilton-branded and 96 Marriott-branded, according to its website in 2026.

Ten programs, one name, one office at 814 East Main Street.

The record on the early vehicles is thin in the sources I could reach. The 2025 annual report lists Cornerstone, Apple Residential, Apple Suites, and Apple Hospitality Two and Five on Knight's biography without dates, and his Wikipedia entry says Apple REITs Two, Five and Six were each sold or merged. From 1999 onward the dates firm up.

The 2016 deal shows how the machine worked. Each Apple Ten unit was exchanged for $1.00 in cash plus 0.522 Apple Hospitality shares, so the buyer issued about 48.7 million shares, paid $93.4 million in cash and assumed roughly $257 million of debt to take in a sister company that Knight had also founded. The buyer and the seller shared a founder and an address, which is the kind of transaction between Apple companies whose disclosure the SEC had questioned two years earlier. Justin Knight, who joined the Apple REIT companies in 2000, told investors the merger had "significantly grown our platform of leading Hilton and Marriott branded select service hotels".

On February 12, 2014, a month before the three-way merger closed, Apple REIT Six, Seven and Eight, Apple Hospitality REIT (then still called Apple REIT Nine), their advisory companies, Glade Knight and chief financial officer Bryan Peery settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission over what the company's 8-K filing calls disclosure deficiencies. The SEC staff had been reviewing the programs' filings since 2008 and found three problems: the way the REITs described how they priced shares sold through their dividend reinvestment plans, the disclosure of pay that executives received from the advisory companies rather than from the REITs themselves, and the disclosure of transactions between one Apple REIT and another. The penalties were $437,500 each for Apple Six Advisors and Apple Eight Advisors, $375,000 for Apple Seven Advisors, $250,000 for Apple Nine Advisors, $125,000 for Knight personally and $50,000 for Peery, a total of $1,675,000, which matches the "nearly $1.7 million" figure on his Wikipedia page. Nobody admitted or denied anything; the filing says the parties consented to an administrative order "without admitting or denying any allegations", and adds that the settlement had no effect on the company's financial statements. The structure that drew the SEC's attention is the same structure that made the programs work: an outside advisory company, owned by the founder, that raised the money, charged the fees and ran the REIT, while the REIT itself owned the hotels. That is the arrangement the SEC's order describes, and it cost the founder $125,000. Three months later he stepped down as chief executive, kept the executive chairman title, and his son took over the operating role. Draw your own conclusion about the timing; the filings do not connect the two events, and neither will this page.

Knight's money and time have gone to a specific set of institutions outside Richmond, most of them tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which he is a member.

• Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista: in 1996 the board of the struggling Southern Virginia College transferred its assets to a new board with many Latter-day Saint members, with Knight, in the university's Wikipedia entry, "the main figure in this reorganization". He chaired the board from 1996 to 2015, the school took its current name in 2001, enrolled about 936 students in fall 2024, and has a Knight Sports Arena on its 155-acre campus.
• Brigham Young University: he helped create the entrepreneurship department in the graduate business school and sits on the BYU National Advisory Council.
• Virginia Commonwealth University: member of the advisory board of its Graduate School of Real Estate and Urban Land Development.
• The Cowboy/Cowgirl Ethics Scholarship for SVU students, which comes with custom boots, a trip to one of his ranches and $1,000 toward tuition.

The ranches are a business of their own. He owns them in Virginia and Texas, races horses competitively, and the Texas operation has twice been named Top Owner and Top Breeder, All Ages, All Divisions. His Wikipedia entry also lists investments in petroleum-based energy and in real estate unrelated to the REITs, without figures, and a long friendship with Bill Marriott, whose company's brands sit on nearly half his hotels. In the Church he has served a mission to England, then as bishop, stake president and now patriarch, a calling in which, as members describe it, a man gives individual blessings to others in his stake. He holds an honorary doctorate from SVU. The custom boots are the detail to remember: the scholarship is the only one I know of that comes with footwear.