About

Selina is a new hospitality group that hosts what it describes as “co-stay, co-live, co-work and co-playing spaces” in fascinating locations around the world. The company is on a mission to become a major hotel chain, displacing industry giants with its new lifestyle and hospitality concept and has been named by Forbes as the new hospitality household name, similar to Airbnb and Uber in their respective industries. As Selina’s legal vice president, Matias Hercovich leads the company’s worldwide real estate, contractual, regulatory, and corporate legal affairs. The expert in-house legal team at Selina, made up of 12 lawyers, support Hercovich in overseeing the company’s compliance programs and all the ongoing legal needs in its current and prospective hospitality portfolio in various global jurisdictions. Other key members of the team include Paola Velasquez who heads the Latin America real estate department from Miami, Alexandra Call who heads the corporate department, Pedro Dolanyi who heads M&As and investments, Alessandra Cerrud who heads the labour department and Mario Zeledon who serves as Latin America contracts manager. The team has been paramount in executing the company’s vision of rapidly expanding its new hospitality concept across Latin America. During the last year, the corporate and labour departments supported Selina’s entrance into the Argentine, Chilean, Peruvian, Brazilian, Ecuadorian and Bolivia markets while helping consolidate the company’s current presence in Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Mexico. The legal team also supported the latest US$95m Series B investment round which had institutional investor Abraaj Group and WeWork’s founder and CEO Adam Neuman as lead investors. Additionally, the team helped to close a US$150m real estate funding deal with DD3 Capital Partners and the acquisition of a new proprietary key software for the company’s integrated hospitality operations. In the past year, Selina’s Latin American real estate legal team was able to negotiate over 100 lease deals and close more than 50 hotel locations with a staggering average of 4.3 agreements signed per month. The team’s novel standardised due diligence and closing process has turned Selina’s real estate team into a closing powerhouse in the industry, inking deals which are expected to generate revenues over US$2m a year. Hercovich highlights that, ‘Latin America is a fascinating region to do business with what we believe is a solid shared civil law legal backbone. Notwithstanding for us keeping up with the pace of international deal making has been challenging when faced with extreme formalities and overwhelming mandatory documentation required in most Latin America jurisdictions’.