Branded residences explained: what they are, how the model works, who runs them and what to check before buying

A branded residence is a privately owned home sold under the name of a hotel or luxury brand and run to that brand's standards by a professional operator, usually with hotel style services paid for through a service charge. Savills counted 910 such schemes worldwide at the end of 2025, roughly four fifths of them carrying a hotel brand.

The terms around this product get used loosely, and most of the searches that bring people here are attempts to tell a branded residence apart from a hotel suite, a serviced apartment or a timeshare. This page sets out the facts as the research houses, the law firms and the brands state them, with the year and source for every figure, and then turns to what matters most for readers of The Luxury of Attention: what living in one is like, and what the model demands of the people who run it.

What a branded residence is

A branded residence is a home sold under the name of a hotel or luxury brand and run to that brand’s standards by a professional operator. Savills’ 2018 report put it plainly: branded residences are normally a partnership between a brand, often a hotel operator, and a developer. The brand licenses its name to the developer, who markets and sells the homes; a hotel operator or a residential management company then runs the building to the brand’s standards. Macfarlanes, a London law firm, describes the product as residences affiliated with a brand “whether by service or design (though often a combination of both).”

Four Seasons calls its homes private residences, Ritz-Carlton and Mandarin Oriental call theirs The Residences, and in Dubai the same thing is often sold as a hotel apartment. Whatever the label, the defining features are the same: whole ownership of a unit, a brand attached by license, an operator running the building under a management agreement, an owners’ association, and a service charge.

The history is usually told in three steps. The Sherry-Netherland in New York, developed by the caterer Louis Sherry and the hotelier Lucius Boomer, opened in 1927; its own fact sheet records that residents took meals from the Sherry kitchen and were looked after by Sherry butlers, housekeepers and concierges. The industry routinely cites it as the first branded residence, though no primary source uses that term for it, so the fairer description is the earliest precursor of the model. Four Seasons names Four Seasons Private Residences Boston in 1985 as its very first residences; by its 2025 count the portfolio spans more than 50 properties with over 20 more in development. The third step came in 2000, when The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Washington, D.C. opened as Marriott’s first branded residences. Marriott’s 25th anniversary release in June 2025 counted around 300 open and pipeline projects across 17 brands and 50 countries and territories, with 14,000 residence owners.

How big the market is

Two research houses count the market and their numbers differ because they count different things. Savills tracks every scheme carrying a hotel or non hotel brand; Knight Frank tracks a narrower set of luxury operators. Both should be cited with their year.

Savills counted 323 schemes in 2015, 764 at the end of 2024 and 910 at the end of 2025, a 19 percent rise in a year and a compound annual growth rate of 10.9 percent over ten years, according to its 2025/2026 annual report published in February 2026. Savills expects a further 837 contracted projects to complete by 2032, taking the total to 1,747 across more than 90 countries, 25 of which are launching their first scheme. Knight Frank’s 2025 Global Branded Residence Survey counted 611 live schemes and more than 1,000 live and pipeline schemes across 83 countries.

By city, Savills’ 2025/2026 report ranks Dubai first with 64 completed schemes and 87 in the pipeline, then South Florida (48 completed, 55 pipeline), New York (32 and 4), London (18 and 7), São Paulo (15 and 15), Phuket (15 and 11) and Los Cabos (13 and 9). The pipeline shows where the next wave is going: Riviera Maya has 7 completed and 20 coming, Cairo 2 and 26, and Ras Al Khaimah none completed and 24 planned.

By region, Savills reports that the Middle East and North Africa grew 187 percent in five years and Asia Pacific 55 percent, and expects that by 2032 no single region will hold more than a quarter of the market. Knight Frank’s 2025 survey shows the same shift: North America’s share falls from 32.7 percent of live schemes to 26.2 percent of the pipeline, while the Middle East rises from 15.9 percent to 26.7 percent.

Most branded residences are attached to a hotel. Savills’ 2025/2026 report finds 72 percent of completed stock is mixed use or co located with a hotel and 28 percent is standalone; in the pipeline the standalone share rises to 33 percent, and Knight Frank’s 2025 survey records co location falling from 82 percent of existing hotel branded residences to 70 percent of the pipeline. Completed schemes split 48 percent resort and 52 percent urban, shifting to 54 percent resort in the pipeline.

How the model works

Behind the brochure sits a stack of contracts. Keystone Law describes five parties: the brand, which licenses its trademark; the developer, which builds and sells the units; the operator, which runs the residences and, where a hotel is attached, the hotel too; the homeowners’ association, which governs the common areas; and the unit owners, often hundreds of individuals. ArentFox Schiff adds that brands generally hold no equity. Their role is to set standards, and they are paid through a negotiated share of licensing or management fees and rental income.

Keystone’s document map runs as follows. A marketing agreement between brand and developer licenses the trademark for sales. A technical services agreement gives the brand the right to sign off on construction and fitting out. The sale and purchase agreement commits the developer to build to brand standards and has the buyer acknowledge that the brand can be withdrawn at any time. A residences management agreement among operator, brand and owners’ association governs the running of the building, with a rental program agreement for each participating owner where a program exists. Hotel linked schemes add a hotel management agreement and a shared facilities agreement, and Keystone states the consequence directly: if the hotel management agreement falls away, the brand on the residences falls away with it.

Who pays whom matters more to a buyer than any single figure. The developer pays the brand a license fee, which the law firms and Savills describe as a percentage of sale price or development value, and Keystone notes a growing practice of a further license fee when a unit is resold. The operator’s management fee is passed to owners through the service charge, which also funds the reserves Keystone lists: a shared facilities reserve, a sinking fund and a furniture, fixtures and equipment reserve. Forsters, another London firm, distinguishes communal facilities such as a gym, pool and spa, which the service charge usually covers, from additional concierge or brand services, which are typically charged per use. Savills’ 2025/2026 report records that service charges top the list of buyer concerns and that sharing amenities with a co located hotel can reduce transparency in how those charges are allocated. Knight Frank’s 2025 guidance names staffing as the single biggest contributor to the service charge and notes that residences often need refurbishment on a five to seven year cycle.

Rental programs are the part of the model that most changes what a buyer is acquiring. Savills’ 2023 research traces them to the early 1990s and divides them into mandatory and optional. In a program the hotel operator exclusively manages and markets the unit, participating owners must conform to the brand’s furniture package, and owners typically receive 40 to 60 percent of gross revenue before paying their own fixed costs, including service charges. Savills’ view is that mandatory programs limit personal use and are more appropriately viewed as investment products. CityRealty cites The Ritz-Carlton Residences NoMad in New York, where owners may stay up to 120 nights a year and the hotel manages the unit when they are away. Savills’ 2025/2026 report adds that many developments operate under touristic licensing that requires owners to join a program, which agents should disclose.

Savills’ 2018 report found a 31 percent average premium over comparable unbranded homes, largest in emerging markets and smallest in mature ones, with examples ranging from above 80 percent at The Ritz-Carlton Residences in Bangkok to 38 percent in Dubai, 8 percent in London and, in some New York cases, a branded discount of 15 percent. Knight Frank’s 2022 report gave a typical range of 25 to 35 percent and noted it could run from 132 percent in some Asian cities to nothing at all; its 2024 Dubai research found an 86 percent premium there against a 30 percent global average. Savills’ 2025/2026 report puts the global average at 33 percent, unchanged on the year, with established cities at 30 percent and resorts at 39 percent, up from 34 percent in 2024. Savills’ conclusion: brand alone is not enough; delivery quality, location and operational execution decide the outcome.

The brands building them

Hotel brands dominate. Savills’ 2025/2026 report finds 79 percent of completed schemes and 78 percent of the pipeline carry a hotel brand; Knight Frank’s 2025 survey puts hotel groups at 83 percent of existing stock and about 80 percent of the future. Marriott and Accor lead as parent groups with pipelines in the hundreds, Four Seasons is the only single brand in Savills’ top ten, and Mandarin Oriental sits eleventh. Marriott’s own residences site lists 227 properties across The Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, W, EDITION and others. Knight Frank’s 2023 report found 68 percent of Aman’s residential portfolio still in development, the highest share of any brand.

The non hotel brands are the newer story. Fashion houses arrived first: Armani Residences at the Burj Khalifa opened in 2010 with resident access to the adjoining Armani hotel, Bulgari’s London residences opened in 2012 and its Dubai building followed around 2018, according to Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2019 survey of the trend. Automotive brands followed in Miami: Dezeen records Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach opening in 2017 with car elevators that deliver vehicles into apartments. Design brands matter more than their fame suggests: Savills found YOO, the studio founded by John Hitchcox and Philippe Starck, overtaking hoteliers to become the largest brand of any kind by project count in 2018, and leading the non hotel category since 2020. Soho House announced in early 2026 that it was launching a branded residences vertical starting in Los Cabos, but none had completed at the time of writing.

Chef signed properties are the arrival I find most interesting. Nobu Hospitality described the Toronto project announced in March 2017 as the first Nobu Residences, an integrated residences, hotel and restaurant scheme. Daniel Boulud at One Vanderbilt, Mauro Colagreco’s expanding hotel and restaurant footprint and Massimo Bottura’s Casa Maria Luigia in Modena are the examples I use in the book. A chef who spent decades building a reputation at one restaurant is now asked to bring an operating standard as well as a name to a residential tower, and the point I make in Chapter 14 is that this is a redefinition rather than a curiosity:

“The next decade’s most distinctive properties will, in many cases, not look like the categories the operator class grew up inside.” The Luxury of Attention (2026), Chapter 14

How a branded residence differs from the alternatives

A hotel suite is rented by the night and the guest has no stake in it. A serviced apartment is a furnished rental with a kitchen and some hotel style services, typically let for about a week to several months. In the United Kingdom it can sit in a planning gray zone: a 2024 appeal decision found a London building’s use was the sui generis use of the property for serviced apartments for short term lets, not residential, citing booking platform advertising, key cards and the absence of individual doorbells and post boxes. A branded residence is held on a freehold or long lease as a dwelling. An aparthotel rents apartments rather than rooms by the night; nobody owns a unit.

A hotel condo, or condo hotel, is the closest cousin and the easiest to confuse. The owner holds title, but the unit sits in the hotel’s room inventory and the owner’s own use is restricted. In the United States the distinction carries legal weight. A 1973 Securities and Exchange Commission release treats a condominium sale as an investment contract when units are sold with emphasis on the economic benefits of the promoter’s management, are part of a rental pool, or where the owner is materially restricted in occupancy. The SEC’s 2002 Intrawest no action letter relied on the developer’s undertakings that sales materials would carry no suggestion of the units as an investment and that no projected rental income or occupancy would be given. This is why the sales team of a well run residence will not talk about rental returns.

A timeshare conveys a deeded week, points or a right to use interval in a unit that may have as many as 52 co owners, and Fidelity Real Estate, which brokers both products, notes that timeshare resale value tends to lessen over time. A private residence club, or fractional, sits between the two: buyers take a deeded fraction, typically one quarter to one thirteenth of a unit, with four to thirteen weeks of use a year at Four Seasons Residence Club, for example. A branded residence is one owner, one home, with unlimited personal use unless a mandatory rental program applies.

What living in one is like

Developers at Savills’ 2022 roundtable said buyers value security, service and support more than physical amenities, and that privacy had become a major priority; the phrase the industry uses is lock up and leave. What the brochures describe less well is the shape of the service relationship itself. In Chapter 14 of The Luxury of Attention I put it this way:

“They live in the building. They have a relationship with the property that compounds across years rather than days.” The Luxury of Attention (2026), Chapter 14

A hotel guest arrives, and the whole architecture of anticipation I describe in the book is built around that arrival. A resident does not arrive in that sense. They were in the building yesterday and will be there in three months. A recognition that delights on a four night stay becomes intrusive on a four month one, so the cadence and visibility of attention have to be rebuilt against a far longer horizon. The team must know the resident, anticipate needs that change over years, protect privacy in a building where everyone knows everyone, and manage the friction among residents. Operators quoted by Hospitality Investor confirm the stakes from the other side: they aim for the same standard across hotel and residences, refuse to treat either the owner or the hotel guest as second tier, and name the director of residences as the key hire. The roughly 30 percent premium, one operator told that publication, depends on standards holding over time.

That last point is why I keep returning to a warning from a hotelier I interviewed years before any of this was common.

“A true luxury offering cannot be achieved if cost cutting is the norm. Success can only come from investing in people, new product offerings and new service ideas.” Kai Speth, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

Speth was talking about hotels. The warning applies with more force to a building where the guest never checks out and the people receiving the service vote on its budget.

What to check before buying

The law firms and consultancies in the sources (Keystone Law, Forsters, Macfarlanes, ArentFox Schiff, Garrigues, Savills, Knight Frank and Million Luxury) converge on a dozen questions. None of them is about the brochure.

1. What exactly does the service charge include, and what is billed on demand? Ask for the list in writing.
2. What is the term of the management agreement, and what are its renewal rights and termination triggers? ArentFox Schiff is blunt that management agreements expire; Macfarlanes notes that an English lease may run 900 years or more while the brand’s involvement is far shorter.
3. Can the brand withdraw, on what grounds, and what happens to the services if the adjoining hotel loses its flag?
4. Who hires and supervises the staff, and who is responsible when service fails?
5. How are the reserves funded, and are special assessments likely? Million Luxury warns that weak reserves hurt resale even in prestigious buildings.
6. Is the rental program mandatory or optional, and what are the usage limits, blackout periods, revenue split and furniture obligations?
7. Is the brand named in the lease or purchase contract, and does the purchaser acknowledgment waive claims against it?
8. How are shared amenity costs allocated between the hotel and the residences?
9. Does the jurisdiction classify the unit as residential or hotel use, and does that affect tenancy registration, financing and resale? In Dubai some hotel apartments cannot register long term tenancies in the Ejari system, and licensing should be confirmed with the Department of Economy and Tourism.
10. What is the comparable unbranded pricing in the same market, and does the local premium justify the cost?
11. Does any license fee apply on resale?
12. Has your own counsel reviewed the condominium documents, planning consents and construction warranties before you exchange?

The risks

The first risk is that the brand leaves. Scott Antel, writing for CoStar’s Hotel News Now, sets out how it happens: the brand’s association can end at any time and without the consent of the residence owners, through a hotel default, underfunded common areas, an owner vote for cheaper management, or a mutual termination once the developer has sold out. CityRealty records the New York examples: Trump branded condominiums renamed One Central Park West and The Dominick, and the closure of the Ritz-Carlton at Battery Park, which took the brand and the hotel amenities with it. Million Luxury’s conclusion is that the premium can fade if service slips, if management changes, or if the property loses its affiliation.

The second is cost. Savills’ 2025/2026 report calls service charges the top buyer concern, Million Luxury points out that recurring fees sit on top of property taxes, insurance and ordinary association dues, and Savills’ 2018 guidance warned that excessive charges damage saleability. The third is the rental program underperforming: Savills’ 2023 research found rental units often run around 20 occupancy points below the co located hotel, and spend in the restaurant and spa is booked to the hotel, not shared with owners. The fourth is the premium itself. It can be zero or negative in mature markets, as Savills’ London and New York figures show, and one developer at Savills’ 2022 roundtable warned that many brands may be hurt by excessive brand extensions. Savills counted 39 new hotel brands and 19 new non hotel brands entering the sector in 2025; not all of them have the operating depth the name implies.

How to verify a residence’s affiliation

Five steps, each supported by the sources. First, find the project on the brand’s own roster: Four Seasons publishes an in development list, Marriott’s Residences site lists its 227 properties, and Aman, Mandarin Oriental and Bulgari maintain official residences pages. Second, read the brand’s disclaimer. Marriott states that it does not own, develop, sponsor or serve as sales or marketing agent of the residential projects on its site, which tells you where responsibility sits. Third, read the residences management agreement and the purchaser acknowledgment, which confirm the limited role of the brand operator and that the brand can be withdrawn. Fourth, in the United Kingdom, confirm whether the brand is expressly named in the template lease, as Forsters advises. Fifth, in Dubai, confirm the freehold title and the building’s tourism licensing status with the regulator.

What this means for people who work in hospitality

Most readers of this site are not buying. They are being asked, more often each year, to run one of these buildings or to put their name on one. The operating discipline the model demands is closer to a members’ club than to a hotel, and I put the core of it in one sentence in Chapter 14:

“The team has to sustain a service standard not just for the night but for the decade.” The Luxury of Attention (2026), Chapter 14

The hotel skills transfer only partly. Recognition, anticipation and recovery were designed for a stay; the resident needs them redesigned for a residency, where privacy inside a small community is a daily discipline and where the people paying for the service also vote on its budget. For chefs the test is succession at scale: a kitchen team that can hold the standard without the founder in the building. The operators who have learned that long relationship discipline are the ones succeeding in the category. The ones who extend the name without extending the operating substance end up, as the market data above suggests, with a premium that quietly disappears.

Chapter 14 of The Luxury of Attention, The Future of Luxury and Craft, places branded residences among the six shifts reshaping the field and sets out what the long relationship model asks of hoteliers and chefs.

Sources

• Savills, Annual Report: Branded Residences 2025/2026
• Savills, Branded residences sector set to record 19% annual growth (February 2026)
• Savills, Spotlight: Branded Residences 2018
• Savills, Branded Residences 2023: rental programs (October 2023)
• Savills, Branded Residences 2022: developer roundtable (October 2022)
• Knight Frank, Global Branded Residences 2022
• World Property Journal on Knight Frank’s Global Branded Residences Report 2023
• Business Today Malaysia on Knight Frank’s Global Branded Residence Survey 2025 (September 2025)
• Khaleej Times on Knight Frank’s Destination Dubai 2024 (June 2024)
• Knight Frank, How to build a branded residence (September 2025)
• The Sherry-Netherland, Fact Sheet 2016
• Four Seasons Magazine, Four Seasons Private Residences history
• Four Seasons Private Residences, In Development
• Mann Report, Marriott International celebrates 25 years in branded residences (June 2025)
• Residences by Marriott, Locations
• Bloomberg Businessweek via BloombergQuint, Luxury Brands Want Their Logos on Your High-Rise (2019)
• Dezeen, Five luxury residential projects designed by luxury car brands
• Canadian Mortgage Professional, Nobu residences, hotel and restaurant in Toronto announced (March 2017)
• Keystone Law, Legal considerations of branded residential developments
• ArentFox Schiff, The Rise of Branded Residences
• CoStar / Hotel News Now, Scott Antel, Loss of brand risk in branded residence projects
• Garrigues, Branded residences and homeowners’ associations
• Forsters, Branded Residences: Tips and Traps for Developers
• Macfarlanes, Branded residences: the cherry on the top
• Hospitality Investor, How to deliver luxury through operations in your branded residences
• Million Luxury, How to evaluate a branded residence
• CityRealty, From Armani to Ritz-Carlton: the perks and pitfalls of branded living
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Intrawest no action letter (November 2002)
• Fidelity Real Estate, Fractional Ownership vs Timeshare
• Fidelity Real Estate, Four Seasons Fractional Ownership