What replaced the trophy home? Branded residences. Aman, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton Reserve, and a growing universe of brand-managed luxury developments now absorb capital that once went into singular trophy assets. The shift is not incremental. Knight Frank’s Global Branded Residence Survey 2025 counts 169 schemes worldwide in 2011, 611 in 2025, and forecasts 1,019 by 2030 (Knight Frank, 2025a). Unit numbers follow the same trajectory: from roughly 27,000 in 2011 to a projected 162,000 by 2030. For a segment that barely existed two decades ago, this is real transformation, not a passing trend.

Drivers are real, not tactical. Branded residences offer something trophy homes cannot: integrated services, professional governance, hospitality-grade maintenance, and immediate liquidity. A Hamptons trophy home requires staff, security, and management. A branded residence delegates all of this to a hospitality operator with global standards. For principals managing multiple residences across continents, this delegation is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Chris Paris, who has documented the residential geography of the global super-rich for over a decade, frames this as the consequence of hyper-mobility. When ownership of three, four, or eight residences becomes normal at the UHNWI level, the day-to-day burden of managing dispersed properties shifts from private staff to outsourced hospitality (Paris, 2013; Paris, 2016). Knight Frank’s Wealth Report 2026 identifies the emerging Ultra-Mobile owner archetype, spending fewer than 90 days a year in any single home (Knight Frank, 2026).

Lifestyle integration matters as much. A Four Seasons residence in Los Angeles offers seamless interaction with Four Seasons properties globally. Same operational excellence. Same concierge access. Same dining and wellness standards. For UHNWI principals increasingly living across multiple branded ecosystems, this consistency has measurable value. Brands compete on this dimension explicitly. Ritz-Carlton leads the sector in absolute number of residential schemes, followed by Four Seasons. Aman and Six Senses lead in growth rate, with 68 and 67 percent of their respective portfolios currently in pipeline (Knight Frank, 2023). What does this tell you? Hospitality brands with contemplative, wellness-driven brand identity are growing faster than the legacy luxury hotel groups, suggesting the new UHNWI buyer is selecting for lifestyle alignment, not just brand prestige.

Liquidity completes the picture. Branded residences trade more efficiently than trophy homes. The brand provides legibility to international buyers who would never acquire a singular Belgravia townhouse without local intermediation. This liquidity premium has become decisive for principals treating their real estate as part of a fluid portfolio rather than a permanent footprint. Knight Frank data indicates branded residences command pricing premiums of 20 to 35 percent over comparable non-branded units in the same market, with stronger resale velocity and rental demand (Knight Frank, 2025b). The implication is direct. The brand functions as a financial instrument as much as a service contract. A buyer in Sao Paulo acquiring a Four Seasons residence in Miami is buying access to a global resale pool no singular Miami trophy home can offer.

Geographic distribution reveals where the trophy home has already lost ground. North America accounts for roughly 40 percent of all branded developments globally, with the US dominating at 106 of the 324 schemes tracked in 2023 (Knight Frank, 2023). Within the US, Florida leads. Within Florida, 80 percent of new developments are concentrated in Miami. The Miami market, fifteen years ago organised around individual trophy waterfront properties, is now structurally a branded residence market. London tells a different version of the same story. The OWO Residences by Raffles, on Whitehall, sold at pricing reaching 12,000 pounds per square foot, a level previously associated only with the rarest Belgravia and Mayfair townhouses.

The trophy home has not disappeared. It has been repositioned. Buyers continuing to acquire singular trophy assets in the Hamptons, Belgravia, the 7th arrondissement, or Beverly Hills are doing so for reasons branded residences cannot satisfy: dynastic positioning, irreplaceable architecture, complete privacy from a hotel-style amenity floor, the symbolic weight of a named address. This segment is becoming smaller and more polarized. Buyers remaining in trophy homes are increasingly multi-generational families with established wealth and a long-term occupancy logic, not principals constructing a global residential portfolio. Rowland Atkinson, Roger Burrows and David Rhodes documented this segmentation in London’s super-rich housing markets, where the top splits between institutional-grade trophy assets held by dynastic capital and brand-managed prime stock acquired by mobile new wealth (Atkinson, Burrows, and Rhodes, 2016).

Competitive dynamics among brands are also reshaping the offer. The first generation of branded residences was co-located with operating hotels, sharing infrastructure and brand association. The second generation, now dominant in the pipeline, is standalone. New developments are designed around private residential amenity floors with hospitality-grade service, without hotel guests circulating through the lobby. Non-hotel brands have entered aggressively. Aston Martin, Bentley, Porsche, Armani, Bulgari, Baccarat, Versace all operate or are developing residential schemes (Knight Frank, 2025a). The non-hotel entrants illustrate a deeper shift. The brand is no longer a hospitality operator endorsing a building. It is a lifestyle identity sold to a buyer who already owns the watch, the car, and the wardrobe.

Private members clubs integration is the next layer of the convergence. Aman New York pairs its residences with a private club. London’s One Carrington, part of the Reuben Brothers’ Piccadilly Estate regeneration, places 28 residences opposite The Carrington, a 70,000 square foot private club designed by Robin Birley (the operator behind 5 Hertford Street). This integration responds to a documented shift in UHNWI behavior. Principals are no longer separating their residence from their social infrastructure. They are buying both in a single transaction.

Service provider implications are real. Real estate brokerages built around trophy home transactions are facing a real change in their pipeline. The trophy home transaction model relied on discretion, personal relationships, and local market knowledge. The branded residence transaction model relies on developer marketing pipelines, international buyer networks, and brand-led demand generation. The skill set required is different. Brokerages investing in international buyer outreach, multilingual capability, and developer relationships are capturing share. Brokerages continuing to operate as local trophy specialists are seeing their transaction volume decline at the very top of the market, even as absolute prices remain strong.

For wealth advisors and family offices, the branded residence trend creates two distinct service requirements. First is acquisition advisory, where the brand layer adds considerations a pure real estate transaction does not raise: residual brand value at resale, brand operator changes, governance dispute resolution, amenity floor obligations. Second is portfolio integration, where principals owning multiple branded residences across different brands face coordination considerations including reciprocity, service standardization, overall cost-of-carry across the portfolio. Few traditional wealth advisors have built the depth to advise on these considerations.

The trophy home has not lost its crown to a single competitor. It has lost to an emerging asset class compressing real estate, hospitality, brand identity, and portfolio liquidity into a single product. For the next decade, the ultra-prime market will be defined by the interaction between residual trophy assets held by dynastic capital with no urgency to liquidate, and the rapidly growing branded segment now setting pricing and design conventions at the apex of the market. The brokerages, developers, and advisors understanding both segments and operating across them will dominate. The ones still treating branded residences as a tactical category will find, transaction by transaction, that the category has become the structure.

References

• Atkinson, R., Burrows, R., and Rhodes, D. (2016) ’Capital City? London’s Housing Markets and the Super-Rich’, in I. Hay and J.V. Beaverstock (eds.) Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 225-243.

• Hay, I. (ed.) (2013) Geographies of the Super-Rich. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-0-85793-568-7.

• Hay, I. and Beaverstock, J.V. (eds.) (2016) Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78347-403-5.

• Knight Frank (2023) Global Branded Residences Report 2023, in partnership with Douglas Elliman. London: Knight Frank Research.

• Knight Frank (2025a) The Global Branded Residence Survey 2025. London: Knight Frank Research.

• Knight Frank (2025b) The Residence Report 2025/26. London: Knight Frank Research.

• Knight Frank (2026) The Wealth Report 2026. London: Knight Frank Research.

• McKenzie, R. and Atkinson, R. (2020) ’Anchoring capital in place: The grounded impact of international wealth chains on housing markets in London’, Urban Studies, 57(1), pp. 21-38.

• Paris, C. (2013) ’The homes of the super-rich: Multiple residences, hyper-mobility and decoupling of prime residential housing in global cities’, in I. Hay (ed.) Geographies of the Super-Rich. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, Chapter 6.

• Paris, C. (2016) ’The Residential Spaces of the Super-Rich’, in I. Hay and J.V. Beaverstock (eds.) Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, Chapter 12, pp. 244-263.

• Savills (2024) Branded Residences Report 2024/25. London: Savills Research.