Check-in forever: hotel-branded homes have arrived

The race for luxury has just levelled up. Australia will soon welcome its first hotel-branded residences at the Gold Coast and Melbourne in what property experts say is the first wave of a global trend.

These high-end apartments are managed by five-star, global hotel brands that cater to every whim of buyers and indulge them as if they were full-time hotel guests.

Room service, cleaning and laundry are just some of the perks, as well as access to on-site restaurants, bars and wellness centres.

Mondrian Gold Coast and 1 Hotel Melbourne are set to become Australia’s first hotel-branded residences when they open this year.

Mondrian is owned by SBE, which is partly owned by accommodation giant Accor, which has 10 designer hotels dotted across the globe, including Cannes, Ibiza and Los Angeles.

1 Hotels is a sustainable luxury hotel chain with a raft of global addresses, including Miami, Paris and Copenhagen.

More branded residences are expected to open in coming years, including Four Seasons Melbourne in partnership with developer Beulah and the Waldorf Astoria at Sydney’s Circular Quay by iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest.

Adrian Parsons of Total Property Group, who manages the sales and marketing for Mondrian Gold Coast, said the branded residences will cater to well-travelled, high-net-worth buyers. “There’s such a transfer of wealth happening in Australia with people travelling overseas and seeing the opportunities out there in Dubai, Miami and so forth, that people are now becoming more familiar with branded residences than they ever have been,” he says.

“They’ve cottoned on to this great lifestyle that people have in the US, certainly Asia Pacific, and parts of Europe, because there are more and more high-net-worth buyers who have multiple residences around the world. But rather than having traditional homes where they are cooking their own meals every day, they have restaurants on tap where they can engage a private chef and it’s a living at a very premium level.”

Another perk for many branded residence buyers is that their hotel-style apartment is part of a larger development containing typical hotel rooms. This means they can entertain a small or large group of guests who can stay the night in their own rooms.

Many residential developers offer close to the same level of amenities, but what sets these residences apart is often the hotel branding, said Karen Wales, head of hotels at Colliers.

“Some of the developers would argue, ‘Well, what is a hotel brand bringing that we don’t have?’ because they’ve got the depth of marketing, they’ve got the databases, and the hotel brands charge a premium for the use of the brand and the access to their global sales networks,” she says.

“But I don’t know if we’ve got such a deep pool of global buyers with deep pockets to match.

“Then the hotel brand has a halo effect that allows for cut-through from a marketing perspective and also then there’s obviously the ability to offer hotel services, which gives something additional to the people who are buying the apartments.”