Developers Are Racing to Give Affluent Buyers the Gift of More Free Time
From arranging dinner parties and meeting the cable guy to hanging artwork and packing suitcases, lifestyle managers help handle residents’ to-do lists
4 min
Luxury developments, already stacked with gyms, theatres and other amenities built to lure wealthy buyers, are now going beyond physical spaces to offer the most precious perk of all: More free time.
Take 1428 Brickell in Miami, for one. The condominium, slated to debut in 2027, will have a bevy of full-time experts to serve homeowners. A sommelier will keep them well supplied with their wines and spirits of choice, source rare vintages and help them discover new producers.
There will also be a wellness concierge to schedule personal training sessions, IV drips and spa treatments and several butlers, porters and valets to fulfil requests like late-night pizza cravings and help packing for a trip.
One Wall Street in Manhattan’s Financial District, which opened in March, counts on its onsite lifestyle manager, Michael Lawrence, to be a constant resource to its residents. The former executive director of operations for the renowned chef Daniel Boulud said that means establishing a relationship with them prior to their move-in date with a handwritten welcome letter.
More: Lazy Rivers, Water Slides—Homeowners Are Splashing out to Bring the Family Together
His notes offer to help them find a moving company, assist with unpacking boxes and stock their kitchen with groceries from the nearby Whole Foods. Lawrence can also arrange for their audio systems to be set up and make appointments with phone and cable providers.
Once owners are settled in, Lawrence acts as a go-to for a variety of needs: He’ll set up daily wake-up calls, make restaurant reservations and even plan their vacations. Most recently, the latter entailed booking a trip to Nashville for an avid Taylor Swift fan to catch the singer’s concert in May. The itinerary also included meals at famous restaurants like Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint, a shopping tour and museum visits.
“Our goal is to anticipate what residents need and do whatever it takes to fulfil those needs,” said Lawrence. “That’s what true hospitality is all about.”
HALL Arts Residences, a 48-unit tower located in Dallas’s Arts District, also offers a full-time lifestyle manager, Rebecca Roberts. The former event planner maintains residents’ homes while they’re gone, secures theatre tickets for coveted shows and orchestrates their dinner parties and other social events.
More: ‘Star Trek’ Mansion Brings the Show to Life
Lynda Ludeman owns a home in the development and said that Roberts was a “huge selling point” for her and her husband when they were deciding where in Dallas they wanted to live.
“I’ll text her when I’m away asking for our plants to be watered and it’s done,” Ludeman said. “I threw a lunch for my friends, and she found the caterer and sourced flowers for the occasion. She’s also arranged for my art to be hung.”
Cindi Caudle, an agent with Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty in Dallas, is the co-lead broker for HALL Arts Residences and said that the building’s service factor is a primary component in closing deals.
“Wealthy buyers, especially since Covid, want the convenience and time savings of a lock-and-leave lifestyle, and unparalleled service gives you that,” she said. “The service levels in luxury developments have significantly stepped up as a result.”
While amenities in the most expensive residential developments have become “bolder and blingier, the quality of service is quickly catching up. said Chris Graham, the founder of the London-based luxury real estate branding consultancy Graham Associates. “The concierge piece of these projects taps into creating a lifestyle that’s supposed to be hard to match,” he said. “High-end real estate nowadays has evolved from the tangible to experiential, and service is the lead.”
The trend applies to both branded and unbranded residences, Graham said.
Other examples of service that aims to transcend the standard to reach the superlative are proliferating in the highest end of residential real estate.
At the yet-to-open Villa Miami, located in the Edgewater neighbourhood, for instance, chefs trained at the perennially popular Major Food Group restaurants like Carbone will be available to cook meals for residents in their homes and ensure that their pantries are continually restocked.
MANSION GLOBAL BOUTIQUE: 9 Chic Home Finds From Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale
Binyan Studios
ONE Tampa, debuting in 2025, is also trying to increase the appeal on the food and beverage front with its Skyline Bistro which will serve food throughout the day and have a barista on staff.
Ed Kahn, the senior vice president for ONE Tampa’s developer Kolter Urban, said that residents will be able to order food to their homes or anywhere else in the building, such as poolside or for pickup through the development’s app.
The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Palm Beach Gardens, an 11-acre development on Palm Beach’s Intracoastal Waterway that’s launching in 2025, will offer personalised service for each of its residents, according to its developer Dan Catalfumo.
“We are going to ask owners to input their likes and preferences into an online system that they can update at any time,” he said. “It will let us know whether they want us to get their boat ready for a day on the water and their favourite poolside drink.”
Catalfumo Companies
Borrowers cannot control the Reserve Bank, but they can control how exposed their household budget is to its next decision. The RBA meets on 29 September with inflation concerns still elevated and major-bank economists increasingly bringing forward their rate-rise calls. Fixed mortgage rates have also been moving, reducing the value of waiting for perfect certainty. …
Continue reading “What mortgage holders should do before the next RBA decision”
Australian shares finished higher on Tuesday, September 22, as a technology rally and lower oil prices outweighed weakness in energy companies and continued anxiety about domestic interest rates. The S&P/ASX 200 closed 25.9 points, or 0.30 per cent, higher at 8,757.8. The All Ordinaries gained 0.36 per cent to 8,951.0, while the All Technology index …
Continue reading “ASX Wrap: Technology lifts the ASX as falling oil relieves inflation pressure”
AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
Odd Culture Group brings a new kind of after-dark energy to the CBD, where daiquiris, disco and design collide beneath the city streets.
From bushland greens to valley reds, the country’s most awarded designers are proving that the best colour palette was never on a swatch card; it was outside the window all along.
