The pitch is simple enough to fit on a hoarding. Buy the apartment, get the hotel: the same doorman, the same housekeeping, the same name over the entrance, and a resale value protected by a brand that has spent a century building it.
Most of that is true. The part that is rarely explained at the sales suite is that you are buying a property and separately buying a contract, that the contract has an end, and that the two do not necessarily travel together.
How big this has become
Savills counted roughly nine hundred and ten branded residence schemes worldwide by the end of 2025, up nineteen per cent in a year from seven hundred and sixty-four. In 2015 there were three hundred and twenty-three. That is a ten-year compound growth rate of just under eleven per cent, and the projection is 1,747 schemes by 2032, of which 837 are already contracted.
Twenty-five countries recorded their first branded residential project during 2025 alone. The sector now operates in more than ninety countries. Knight Frank puts global growth at fifty-nine per cent over the five years to 2029 and finds that more than eighty per cent of projects are delivered by luxury hotel brands.
The Middle East and North Africa grew fastest of all: one hundred and eighty-seven per cent over five years. And the single largest market on earth is Dubai, with sixty-four completed schemes and eighty-seven more in the pipeline — ahead of South Florida, ahead of New York.
Read also: Butler, villa host, guest experience manager: what hotel service tiers mean
The premium
The number the industry quotes is a thirty-three per cent average premium over comparable unbranded stock: about thirty per cent in urban markets and thirty-nine per cent for resorts.
Treat that figure with appropriate care. It is an average across a very wide range, it is produced by firms that also advise on branded schemes, and a premium measured at sale is not the same as a premium realised at resale. What is not in dispute is that the premium exists and that buyers pay it willingly.
Marriott and Accor lead the sector at scale, each with more than thirty-five brands active in it. Four Seasons is the strongest single-brand operator and the only individual brand in the top ten. Hotel brands account for seventy-nine per cent of completed inventory; the rest is design and fashion houses licensing their names to developers.
Source: Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The four documents
What you are buying resolves into four separate agreements, and the sales brochure will describe one of them.
The marketing licence. The brand permits the developer to use its name, usually in exchange for a percentage of the sale price of each unit. This is the piece the buyer is emotionally purchasing and the piece with the least operational content.
The technical services agreement. A fee paid to the brand for ensuring the residences are built and finished to its standards. This is why the ironmongery is good.
The supervisory services agreement. This documents the management and additional services the brand or operator will actually provide, and it is funded through your service charge. Anything beyond the baseline is charged à la carte.
The homeowners’ arrangements. Once units are sold, separate agreements govern the common areas, and the operator becomes woven into long-term obligations that outlive the developer.
Ask for all four before exchange. A developer unwilling to show you the supervisory services agreement is telling you that the service you are imagining is not the service you have bought.
When the brand leaves
This is the part that is almost never discussed and it is the reason the four documents matter.
Termination clauses allow brand operators to withdraw — including where the underlying hotel management agreement ends, or in a dispute. The legal position, as set out by practitioners in the field, is that a hotel owner may exercise a right to terminate the manager and remove the brand from the private residences. Good sale documentation discloses plainly that the operator may be changed for another at any time.
It happens. The Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas was converted to a Waldorf Astoria in 2018, with Hilton assuming full operation of the property. Owners in a branded scheme in that position do not lose their homes. They lose the name on the building, and whatever share of their purchase price was attributable to it.
Source: Gfilip, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Dubai, specifically
If you are buying in the world’s largest branded-residence market, four local facts change the analysis.
Branded residences generally fall under Dubai’s jointly owned property regime, overseen by RERA. There are no statutory homeowners’ associations in Dubai, so RERA requires licensed building management companies to act on behalf of collective owners — you do not get an owners’ association in the sense a European or American buyer would expect.
Service charges must be approved by RERA, which assesses whether they are reasonable and consistent with market standards before they can be levied. That is a genuine protection and it is stronger than most markets offer.
Long-term supply agreements are restricted by law to periods of between one and three years absent a special exemption, which constrains how far ahead an operator’s arrangements can be locked in. And developers must make adequate disclosures to off-plan purchasers about management arrangements, with failure potentially allowing the buyer to terminate.
The questions to ask
How long does the licence run, and what happens at expiry? Is the licence tied to the hotel management agreement next door, and what happens if that ends? What exactly does the service charge fund, and what is à la carte? If there is a rental pool, what are the furnishing and maintenance obligations, and how many weeks may you use your own apartment? And what is the brand’s termination right?
None of these questions is hostile. All of them have answers, and the schemes worth buying answer them without hesitation.
Read also: Aman, Six Senses, Rosewood, Reserve: the ultra-luxury brands compared
Whether it is worth it
For a buyer who will genuinely use hotel services — who wants the apartment maintained in their absence, who travels constantly, who values a single point of contact — a branded residence is a rational purchase and the premium buys something real.
For a buyer purchasing primarily because the name is reassuring, it is an expensive way to buy reassurance, and the reassurance is contractual rather than permanent. Nine hundred and ten schemes is a lot of names on a lot of buildings. Some of those names will change.
Featured Image Source: Norlando Pobre, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
