Knight Frank’s September survey shows that more than half of the world’s branded residences are now outside cities. The operating model that made branded residences work was urban and year-round. It does not travel as easily as the name does.
In 2016, fewer than four in ten branded residence schemes were located outside a major city. According to Knight Frank’s Global Branded Residence Survey, published on 16 September, more than half are now in coastal, island or mountain destinations, and the share is forecast to reach 57 per cent by 2028.
The headline numbers in that survey are the ones that will be quoted: 354 schemes in 2015, 903 by the end of 2025, roughly 1,088 this year carrying more than 170,000 units, and a projection of some 1,800 schemes and 300,000 units by 2031. Those figures describe an asset class that has stopped being a niche.
The more consequential number is the quieter one, because it is not about how many branded residences exist. It is about where they are, and therefore about what has to be built underneath them.
What a city scheme is actually standing on
A branded residence in Milan, London or Miami is usually attached to a machine. There is a hotel below it, or beside it, with a permanent staff, a service corridor, a kitchen that never closes, an engineering team on shift, a procurement department, a laundry, and a general manager whose bonus depends on the building working. The residence buys into that machine. Much of what the owner experiences as brand is in fact proximity to an operation that already exists and runs three hundred and sixty-five days a year, whether or not that particular apartment is occupied.
Move the same scheme to a bay on the Aegean, a Sardinian headland, or an island in the Cyclades, and most of that machine is not there. The resort beside it may close, or run at a fraction of capacity, from November to April. The trained staff are seasonal and many of them leave the region entirely in winter. The nearest competent electrical contractor may be two hours away, and the nearest one who has seen this specific system before may not exist. Procurement means a van and a ferry. And the residence still has to be ready, because the owner’s arrival is not a booking — it is a decision taken four days in advance.
This is the part that does not travel. The brand travels. The design standard travels. The service script travels. The permanent, year-round operational substrate that made the script deliverable does not.
The second number
There is a related shift in the same survey. Hotel brands — Marriott, Accor, Hilton, Four Seasons, IHG and their peers — account for roughly 70 per cent of schemes already in operation. Including the pipeline, that share falls to about 60 per cent. Separate sector analysis published in April put non-hospitality brands at around 21 per cent of new launches.
Read those two findings together and the picture is specific: a growing proportion of branded residences will carry names belonging to companies that have never run a building. A fashion house, a car marque, a designer or a developer’s own house brand can supply identity, materials and a standard of finish. What it does not have is a two-hundred-page operating manual, a training pipeline, or thirty years of institutional knowledge about what happens when the pool circulation fails on the first Saturday of August.
Some of these schemes contract an operator. Many do not, or contract one for a defined term. Industry analyses note that brand management agreements commonly run twenty to thirty years, with renewal a matter of negotiation rather than something secured by the title deed. A buyer’s ownership is permanent. The arrangement that justifies the premium is not.
Where this lands on this coast
Türkiye is in the middle of this shift. Bvlgari Hotels & Resorts is developing a resort and branded mansions in Bodrum, the brand’s first in the country. Bodrum, Çeşme and Göcek are absorbing branded and semi-branded stock at a pace the local operating infrastructure has not matched.
It is worth noting what the sector’s own research says about this. Knight Frank’s developer-facing Residence Report for 2025/26 identifies the new frontier markets by name: Sardinia, Portugal’s Comporta, Fiji, the Hudson Valley, Texas. Türkiye, Bodrum and the Eastern Mediterranean do not appear in it at all.
That absence is not a judgement on the market. It is a description of the coverage. Capital is arriving on this coast faster than the analysis, the benchmarks and the service standards that normally arrive with it — which means buyers here are making decisions with less comparative information than a buyer in Sardinia, and operators here are being measured against a standard nobody has written down.
The house next door inherits nothing
There is a second consequence, and for most owners on this coast it is the more immediate one.
When a branded scheme opens in a bay, it raises the expected standard for everything around it. The privately owned villa three hundred metres away — often larger, often older, often more valuable — now sits next to a property with a documented service specification, a maintenance calendar and someone accountable for both. The private owner inherits none of that. He has a caretaker, a gardener, three contractors and a phone.
The gap is not one of money. It is one of structure. The branded unit is not better maintained because its owner spends more; it is better maintained because somebody’s job is to know the condition of the building and to say so in writing. That function exists in the branded scheme by contract. In the private residence, it exists only if the owner deliberately creates it. That deliberate act is what residence governance means in practice.
What has to exist underneath
None of this is an argument against branded residences on a seasonal coast. It is an argument that the name is the visible half of the proposition and the operating layer is the half that determines whether the proposition survives its third winter.
For a branded scheme, that means asking who actually operates it, under what agreement, for how long, and what happens at renewal. For the private owner next door, it means building the equivalent deliberately: inspection on a schedule rather than on a complaint, preventive maintenance held to a calendar, vendors under written scope, a documented operating record for the house, and one person on the owner’s side whose obligation is to report the condition of the property honestly — including when the news is unwelcome.
The brands are leaving the city. What made them work in the city is still there, and most of it is not coming.
