In 2015 there were 323 branded residences in the world. By the end of 2025, according to the Savills Branded Residences Report 2025–2026, there were around 910 — a compound annual growth rate of just under eleven percent, comfortably ahead of both the global hospitality sector and the wider real estate market over the same decade. The contracted pipeline runs to some 1,747 developments by 2032.
During 2025 alone, twenty-five countries received their first branded residential project. That is not a trend. That is a structural change in how a certain kind of person acquires property.
What Is Actually Being Purchased
The obvious reading is that these buyers are paying for a name on the door. It is not quite right, and the error matters.
What a branded residence sells is the abolition of domestic administration. Someone else finds the housekeeper. Someone else handles the failed boiler, the annual maintenance, the deliveries, the plants, the linen. The apartment is warm and stocked when you land and inert when you leave, and at no point does any of it require a decision from you.
Consider who is buying. A recent Perfect.Live report found that nearly half of high-net-worth individuals now run households in three or more countries. Once you cross that threshold, the constraint on your life stops being money and becomes attention. Four homes in four jurisdictions means four sets of contractors, four sets of local staff, four sets of small failures arriving in your inbox in languages you may not read. The branded residence is, at bottom, a device for making the fourth home cost the same in attention as the first. Seen that way, the brand is not decoration. It is a warranty on a service standard, enforceable, portable, and — crucially — familiar. You already know exactly what an Aman lobby smells like.
The Three Waves
The category has moved through three distinct phases, and most commentary conflates them.
First, the hotel-adjacent residence: apartments attached to a working hotel, drawing on its staff and facilities. This is where the model was proven, and it is still where most of the volume sits.
Second, the standalone: residential buildings operated by a hotel brand with no hotel attached at all. The service model without the guests. This is now the fastest-growing part of the sector.
Third, the non-hotel brand — and this is where it becomes genuinely interesting. Armani, Bulgari, Fendi, Missoni, Elie Saab, Porsche Design, Pininfarina, Bentley, Aston Martin. Fashion houses and carmakers translating a design identity into architecture, betting that someone who has bought the coat will buy the building.
The Hierarchy
By project count, Marriott and Accor lead, but through breadth — thirty-five-plus brands apiece, which is a portfolio strategy rather than a point of view. Four Seasons remains the most influential single brand, with Mandarin Oriental close behind. The ultra-luxury tier belongs to Aman, Auberge, Montage, Kerzner, Rosewood, and Banyan. Aman’s discipline is the instructive one: its residential projects rarely exceed thirty units. In a sector defined by expansion, its position is defined by declining to expand — which is, of course, exactly why the position holds.
The Part Worth Watching
By 2032, Savills projects that no single region will hold more than a quarter of global supply. The category is dispersing rather than concentrating.
The obvious risk is dilution. A brand agreement is a contract, and contracts expire; a residence whose operator walks away is simply an expensive flat with an awkward lobby. The buildings that will still command a premium in a decade are the ones where the brand was a genuine operating philosophy rather than a licensing fee — which is a distinction almost impossible to see from a showflat, and painfully obvious after ten years. For the wealth patterns driving all of this, see our coverage of the new geography of wealth.
Explore the ultra-luxury end of the category at Aman’s official site.
Featured photo: © Aman Group
