There’s a sense of inevitably about this home in regional NSW, or, at least, destiny. When owners David and Pippa Beak, of Beak & Sons fame, decided to buy a property outside of Sydney, Pippa already had a place in mind. The Sydney couple were looking for a second home where they could entertain family and friends, as well as business contacts associated with their company, Mr Beak’s, who manufacture ready made meals, sausages and other meat products available through major supermarkets.
The locality of Kerrabee, equidistant between Mudgee, Muswellbrook and Rylstone, is prime farming land, ideal for raising top quality cattle. It also had a 1.2ha property Pippa was already familiar with.
“Pippa’s father attempted to buy this farm about 50 years ago and missed out,” says architect Michael Bell. “It turned out it was available, so they bought it.”
While the farmland was perfect for running Angus, a renowned carcass breed, the existing house was not the light-filled farmhouse the couple had envisaged. However, it did offer clues to the best position for a new home.
“When you’re working with a new site, you don’t always know the land well and you have to make sure to pick somewhere where it will not flood,” Bell says.
“The original site is a good place to start because the house had been there for a number of years (without incident).”
The old house would have to make way for the new, but instead of demolishing the existing three-bedroom dwelling, which was relatively new, it was relocated further up the hill to function as additional accommodation when guests come to stay.
The farmhouse kitchen is perfect for entertaining. Image: Justin Alexander
For the main site, Bell designed a welcoming four-bedroom house in a classic farmhouse style that functions like a contemporary home. Key to creating the look and feel the owners desired was the corrugated steel pitched roof with deep wraparound verandas to offer protection from the summer heat while still allowing the sun to penetrate the house in winter.
“They wanted something that appeared established,” Bell says. “They liked the look of the large rooms and the wraparound verandas, but it was also important that the kitchen faced east to get that morning sun and they wanted to be able to look across the garden.”
Internally, 3.2m high ceilings in all the rooms create a sense of space, light and old world charm, while slightly wider French doors carry the theme through without interrupting the flow.
“Even though the language is that traditional style, we started with 3.2m high ceilings, and we have those large doors to get that open feel at the same time as maintaining the look of the old style house,” he says. “It’s traditional, warm and familiar but it is also open and light like a modern house.
“There’s also plenty of light and air which some people feel they will not get in a house like this.”
While it is often just the owners at the house, they regularly cater for guests, so the open plan kitchen needed to be suitable for managing larger groups as well as the couple’s day-to-day needs.
An expansive island bench with marble top and open shelving works in well with the Shaker-style profile to provide the entertainer’s kitchen David and Pippa required.
“Pippa is a keen cook and she has access to the best food,” Bell says. “A big part of David’s business is networking and they will often have up to 14 visitors at a time.”
The generous living area has the ability to be partially closed off when desired, which is especially useful in winter when the fire is in use, but internal French doors and a central ceiling fan ensure air flow is maintained.
The living room can be closed off to maintain temperatures. Image: Justin Alexander
In keeping with the focus on entertaining, design work on the property extended outdoors, with a fenced-in pool and classic cabana along with not one, but three outdoor cooking facilities.
“David grew up in Argentina so he wanted a Brazilian barbecue, along with a pizza oven and a standard barbecue,” Bell says. “They also have grown children and grandchildren so the house is serving that extended family.”
While the property is very much a working farm, Bell says there are some departures from the traditional layout.
“We put the house away from the sheds and up the valley a bit further. It’s a ‘city people’ thing to do,” he says. “Farmers are on the land all the time and they will have the house close to the sheds so they don’t have to walk.
“The main thing was to be able to hook up to the existing electricity otherwise you would have to put up new poles and wires. The house was a fraction too big to be completely off grid but it’s all solar with diesel back up.”
Although construction was completed during COVID lockdowns, the work schedule was relatively unaffected. Scone builder Darryl Rossington from Rossington Building Contractors was tasked with completing the construction of the house.
“Because we live in Kiama, we weren’t affected by the Sydney lockdowns while this was built. We got most of it done prior to the supply chain issues,” says Bell.
Although Bell visited the site regularly, having a builder experienced in classic farmhouse-style buildings was essential.
“If you have builders who are used to doing our kind of work, using people like Darryl makes things easier,” Bell says.
“If a builder who is used to doing contemporary work is asking me about things like gutter profiles, it slows things down.
“With Darryl, I don’t have to talk about those things, and it’s important because you can’t get up there on site at the drop of a hat.
The big wedding can wait. Couples are deciding they would rather take the plunge into homeownership.
In reshuffling the traditional order of adult milestones, some couples may decide not to marry at all, while others say they are willing to delay a wedding. Buying a home is as much, if not more of a commitment, they reason. It helps them build financial stability when the housing market is historically unaffordable.
In 2023, about 555,000 unmarried couples said that they had bought their home in the previous year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Census Bureau data. That is up 46% from 10 years earlier, when just under 381,000 couples did the same.
Unmarried couples amounted to more than 11% of all U.S. home sales. The percentage has climbed steadily over the past two decades—a period in which marriage rates have fallen. These couples make up triple the share of the housing market that they did in the mid-1980s, according to the National Association of Realtors.
To make it work, couples must look past the significant risk that the relationship could blow up, or something could happen to one partner. Without a marriage certificate, living situations and finances are more likely to fall into limbo, attorneys say.
Mark White, 59 years old, and Sheila Davidson, 62, bought a lakeside townhouse together in Newport News, Va., in 2021. But only her name is on the deed. He sometimes worries about what would happen to the house if something happened to her. They have told their children that he should inherit the property, but don’t have formal documentation.
“We need to get him on the deed at some point,” Davidson said.
White and Davidson both had previous marriages, and decided they don’t want to do it again. They also believe tying the knot would affect their retirement benefits and tax brackets.
Financial foundation
Couples that forgo or postpone marriage say they are giving priority to a financial foundation over a legal one. The median homeowner had nearly $400,000 in wealth in 2022, compared with roughly $10,000 for renters, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
Even couples that get married first are often focused on the house. Many engaged couples ask for down-payment help in lieu of traditional wedding gifts.
“A mortgage feels like a more concrete step toward their future together than a wedding,” said Emily Luk, co-founder of Plenty, a financial website for couples.
Elise Dixon and Nick Blue, both 29, watched last year as the Fed lifted rates, ostensibly pushing up the monthly costs on a mortgage. The couple, together for four years, decided to use $80,000 of their combined savings, including an unexpected inheritance she received from her grandfather, to buy a split-level condo in Washington, D.C.
“Buying a house is actually a bigger commitment than an engagement,” Dixon said.
They did that, too, getting engaged eight months after their April 2023 closing date. They are planning a small ceremony on the Maryland waterfront next year with around 75 guests, which they expect to cost less than they spent on the home’s down payment and closing costs.
The ages at which people buy homes and enter marriages have both been trending upward. The median age of first marriage for men is 30.2, and for women, 28.6, according to the Census Bureau. That is up from 29.3 and 27.0 a decade earlier. The National Association of Realtors reported this year that the median age of first-time buyers was 38, up from 31 in 2014.
Legal protections
Family lawyers—and parents—sometimes suggest protections in case the unmarried couple breaks up. A prenup-like cohabitation agreement spells out who keeps the house, and how to divide the financial obligations. Without the divorce process, a split can be even messier, legal advisers say.
Family law attorneys say more unmarried people are calling for legal advice, but often balk at planning for a potential split, along with the cost of drawing up such agreements, which can range from $1,000 to $3,000, according to attorney-matching service Legal Match.
Dixon, the Washington condo buyer, said she brushed off her mother’s suggestion that she draft an agreement with Blue detailing how much she invested, figuring that their mutual trust and equal contributions made it unnecessary. (They are planning to get a prenup when they wed, she said.)
There are a lot of questions couples don’t often think about, such as whether one owner has the option to buy the other out, and how quickly they need to identify a real-estate agent if they decide to sell, said Ryan Malet, a real-estate lawyer in the D.C. region.
The legal risks often don’t deter young home buyers.
Peyton Kolb, 26, and her fiancé figured that a 150-person wedding would cost $200,000 or more. Instead, they bought a three-bedroom near Tampa with a down payment of less than $50,000.
“We could spend it all on one day, or we could invest in something that would build equity and give us space to grow,” said Kolb, who works in new-home sales.
Owning a place where guests could sleep in an extra bedroom, instead of on the couch in their old rental, “really solidified us starting our lives together,” Kolb said. Their wedding is set for next May.
Homes and weddings have both gotten more expensive, but there are signs that home prices are rising faster. From 2019 to 2023, the median sales price for existing single-family homes rose by 44%, according to the National Association of Realtors. The average cost of a wedding increased 25% over that time, according to annual survey data from The Knot.
Rent versus buy
Roughly three quarters of couples move in together before marriage, and may already be considering the trade-offs between buying and renting. The cost of both has risen sharply over the past few years, but rent rises regularly while buying with a fixed-rate mortgage caps at least some of the costs.
An $800 rent hike prompted Sonali Prabhu and Ryan Willis, both 27, to look at buying. They were already paying $3,200 in monthly rent on their two-bedroom Austin, Texas, apartment, and felt they had outgrown it while working from home.
In October, they closed on a $425,000 three-bed, three-bath house. Their mortgage payment is $200 more than their rent would have been, but they have more space. They split the down payment and she paid about $50,000 for some renovations.
Her dad’s one request was that the house face east for good fortune, she said. Both parents are eagerly awaiting an engagement.
“We’re very solid right now,” said Prabhu, who plans to get married in 2026. “The marriage will come when it comes.”
The last time emerging markets were doing this badly the term “emerging markets” hadn’t been coined yet.
That spells opportunity, and the greatest spoils might go to those investors who are the boldest and also willing to look past that poorly-defined category. The benchmark for how emerging markets stocks are doing is a widely followed index maintained by MSCI that has returned less than 4% annually in the past five years, compared with nearly 12% for global equities and more than 15% for U.S. stocks.
Dig into any of those broad categories, though, and there are clear leaders and laggards. A whopping 65% of the MSCI All Country World Index’s market value, including nine of its top 10 stocks, were American as of the end of October. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index has been dragged down in large part since 2020 by China, where a housing crisis and a heavy-handed approach to technology firms by leader Xi Jinping have depressed valuations. Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings were two of the world’s most valuable companies four years ago, before the tech crackdown.
If not for the massive surge of the MSCI index’s Chinese components in September on renewed stimulus hopes, the overall picture for emerging-markets stocks would be even worse. India, in no small part because it isn’t China, has seen huge foreign and domestic investor interest and now has the third largest weighting in the emerging-markets index. But it also is one of the world’s pricier markets .
Emerging markets outperformed developed market stocks in the century’s first decade as commodity prices boomed and the tech and housing bubbles dented the U.S. market. Today, though, they are much cheaper as a multiple of earnings, and not solely because of China.
Just buying an emerging-markets index fund and betting on the performance pendulum swinging back could be a decent strategy. Bolder investors might be able to do better: The most enticing opportunities are where skepticism is highest.
For example, Mexico and the multinational companies that use it as a base to sell products destined for the U.S. are in President-elect Donald Trump ’s crosshairs. Newly-elected leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum also faces violent drug cartels and protests over changes to the country’s judiciary. But the MSCI Mexico Index has gone absolutely nowhere, with a slightly negative return over the past decade and a forward price-to-earnings ratio of around 10 times—less than half that of the U.S. market.
And Mexico is pricey compared with South Africa, Brazil and Turkey, which fetch multiples on the same measure of about 9.8 times, eight times and five times, respectively. All three also face significant domestic problems and leaders who have mismanaged their economies. But even poorly-run countries can have long-term promise, and occasionally some short-term charms: Brazil’s dividend yield, for example, is about 6%, or five times that of the S&P 500 index.
Another way to profit as a savvy emerging-markets investor? By reading what is on the label and then ignoring it. MSCI’s benchmark has had an odd definition of what qualifies that mostly matters to professional money managers.
For example, both South Korea and Taiwan are major emerging markets, but their citizens are wealthier than those of developed Portugal or Greece. With leading high-tech companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co . and Samsung Electronics , educated workforces and excellent infrastructure, they have more in common with neighbouring Japan, a developed market. MSCI cites market access issues that hold them back. That might still make them attractive places to invest, but the rapid growth a country enjoys by becoming modern, educated and wealthy—the sort of thing that has people so excited about India’s long-term potential—are now behind them.
Getting booted from the index can create anomalies too. Israel, which is richer than Britain or France , was included in the emerging-markets index until 2010 for what seems like geographical reasons. Then it went from being a notable emerging-markets investing destination to irrelevancy for many fund managers.
Because it is the only officially “developed” market in the Middle East, Israel is now part of the little-tracked MSCI Europe and Middle East Index created that year instead of the more-followed MSCI Europe, which dates to 1986. It is also a minuscule part of MSCI EAFE, which tracks 21 non-U.S. developed markets. With world class healthcare and tech companies like Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Check Point Software in the index, “Startup Nation’s” stocks trade at barely half of the forward price-to-earnings ratio of the tech-heavy U.S. market.
And there are other stock markets just waiting to join, or rejoin, the official emerging-markets club. By the time they do the best gains might have been had. Take Argentina , which was demoted to “stand-alone” status three years ago because it was difficult to invest there. It has had a blistering return in dollars of almost 50% a year in the three years through October compared with a negative return for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index over that time.
While far from a foolproof investing strategy, betting that the last shall be first and buying what feels uncomfortable could pay off when it comes to beaten-down emerging-markets stocks.
Artificial intelligence is poised to transform both work and everyday life. But it has a dark underside: AI computer centres consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, to power their processing chips and cool the heat they emit.
Annual U.S. electricity use by data centres of all types will rise from 3% to 4% of the nation’s total today to between 11% and 12% in 2030, with AI being the main driver, according to projections from consulting firm McKinsey.
Meantime, AI’s demand for water globally in 2027 could account for more than the total annual amount withdrawn for use in Denmark or half of that in the U.K., according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside and University of Texas at Arlington.
All of that heavy use is causing logistical and public-image problems for the industry. Some utilities struggle to supply the needs of AI providers, and communities push back, fearing the added use will boost power prices and deplete water supplies.
The biggest AI providers, including Amazon , Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta and Microsoft , say they are working to be both carbon-neutral and replenish more water than they use—even as they continue to build massive data centres.
“It will be harder to build data centres, especially where energy already is at a premium or water might be scarce,” says Ed Anderson, research vice president at technology advisory firm Gartner. But, he adds, “the economic opportunity is rich enough that the providers will find a way.”
Below are some of the steps tech companies and researchers are hoping will reduce AI’s appetite for power and water.
Making chips more efficient
One way of addressing power consumption is to make chips less power hungry. Nvidia , the largest maker of AI processors, says its newest ones, called Blackwell, will be about 25 times as energy efficient as its previous high-end version. Meanwhile, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are designing their own processing chips, in part to cut costs but also to make them use less power.
“Each generation has been significantly more efficient than the prior one,” says Google’s Partha Ranganathan , a vice president and engineering fellow, speaking of his company’s processing units.
Different sources for water
Equipment used to cool data centres creates another issue: where to get the vast amount of water these systems consume. Google says its data centers globally used about 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, equivalent to the water used to irrigate and maintain 40 golf courses in the Southwest each year.
OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, meantime, consumes the equivalent of a 16.9-ounce bottle of water for every 10 to 50 responses it provides to users’ queries, according to the researchers at UC Riverside and UT Arlington. OpenAI declined to comment on the finding.
Data-centre water typically comes from municipal water systems. But in an era of water shortages, diverting drinking water for an industrial use has created tensions in some locales. That has sent AI companies searching for other sources, including rainwater, treated wastewater or water left over from factory processes.
Amazon, for example, uses recycled wastewater for cooling at its Santa Clara, Calif., data centers. The water comes from the city’s sewage-treatment system after it undergoes a three-step process that removes 99% of impurities.
Smarter training for AI
Some researchers have experimented with carefully controlling what kind and how much information an AI model takes in during training. Usually, training a so-called large language model AI, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, involves ingesting hundreds of billions of words from the internet and elsewhere, then learning the relationships among them.
And that is energy and water intensive. Training an AI model called BLOOM over a 3½-month period consumed enough electricity to power the average U.S. home for 41 years, according to a Stanford University report.
As for water, training one of Google’s AI models, known as LaMDA, used about two million liters of it, both to produce the electricity used and keep the computers cool—enough to fill about 5,000 bathtubs, according to Shaolei Ren , a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Google declined to comment on the research, but said it is “committed to climate-conscious cooling of our data centres.”
One possible solution is to have AIs remove redundancy and low-quality data, instead of just vacuuming up the whole internet. The goal is a much smaller set of data that the AI system can more easily sift through when a user asks it a question.
This can lower electricity consumption, according to some researchers.
AI systems that limit the information they take in are also less likely to “hallucinate”—give false or misleading answers—and can respond in ways that are more on-point because of the higher quality of the data they contain, experts say. Microsoft found that one of its pared-down AIs exceeded that of vastly larger ones in measurements of common sense and logical reasoning .
Dialling down the juice
Researchers at several universities have found that capping the amount of electricity used by AI computers has only a minor effect on the outcome, such as slightly more processing time.
Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University say that reducing the power to one of Meta’s AIs by 22% to 24% slowed the speed at which the AI responded to a query by only 5% to 8%. “These techniques can lead to significant reduction in energy consumption,” the researchers say. They add that the method also caused the processors to run at a lower temperature—which could trim the need for cooling.
Meta declined to comment on the research, but said it has had efforts to boost data-centre energy efficiency “since we started designing our first data center over a decade ago.”
Meantime, a team at the University of Michigan, University of Washington and University of California, San Diego devised an algorithm to modulate the use of power during training. The technique could cut power use by up to 30% , they say.
Show users AI’s impact
Some researchers believe companies should give users more context about the environmental impact of AI, to let them make more-informed decisions about the technology. Ren, of UC Riverside, proposes that AI providers disclose the approximate amount of electricity and water each query consumes—akin to how Google tells people searching for flights the amount of carbon emissions each trip would create.
Another proposal is to devise a rating system for the power efficiency of AI systems, akin to the government’s Energy Star ratings for home appliances and other products. Such a system could help people choose AI models for differing tasks based on their energy consumption, according to Sasha Luccioni , an AI researcher at Hugging Face, a company that makes machine-learning tools.
Using greener power
Academics and others have come up with other proposals to minimise AI’s environmental impact by tapping into green energy. For instance, companies might build more data centers in countries with abundant, low-emission power, such as hydropower in Norway or geothermal in Iceland. Or companies might do AI calculations at different locations at different times of the day, such as deploying computer centers with high use of solar power during the daytime or wind-powered ones when wind is more reliable at night.
Chilling the computers
Data-centre computers put out tremendous amounts of heat, and their temperature must be kept in a certain range, often 64 to 72 degrees, to prevent damaging the electronics. Traditionally, this has been done by high-power air conditioning. But air conditioning uses up to 40% of all the electricity consumed by a typical data centre, while devices called cooling towers that expel the heat to the outside air use a lot of water.
In response, the data-centre industry is moving to liquid cooling, which circulates a special liquid or cold water to “cold plates” that sit on top of the processor chips and keep them at a safe and efficient temperature range. The system, called direct-to-chip liquid cooling, uses less power than the traditional method—about 30% less, Nvidia says—because liquid is vastly better at removing heat from the electronics than blowing cold air over them.
Another method under development, called immersion cooling, involves placing the computers themselves inside big tanks of cooling liquid. While showing early promise, there are environmental concerns about the chemicals often used in the setup, says Mark Russinovich , chief technology officer of Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing unit.
Some companies, meanwhile, are using computing gear that can withstand higher temperatures and doesn’t need as much cooling. Google says its data centres already are 1.8 times as energy efficient as the typical data centre, which it achieved in part by raising the inside temperature to 80 degrees. For every one-degree boost in their temperature, data centres can save 4% to 5% in energy costs, according to the Energy Star program.
“Are those fireworks or something?” asked a passenger on Emirates flight EK146 from Amsterdam to Dubai last month, in a video posted to social media. In fact, what she was watching through her cabin window was a barrage of Iranian missiles headed to Israel.
Her flight was one of scores that shared the skies with Iranian missiles on Oct. 1, an example of how the escalating conflict in the Middle East is endangering commercial aircraft in some of the world’s busiest skies.
The number of missiles crisscrossing the region has surged since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas: An average of 162 missiles have been fired each month so far this year, up from 10 a month in 2023, according to aviation security firm Osprey Flight Solutions. This has led to warnings from airlines, crews, security experts and families of air crash victims that an airliner could inadvertently be shot out of the sky.
Missiles have been spotted in-flight by pilots and passengers, struck near airports, and been fired by militaries and militias without warning to airlines. Governments and aviation regulators have meanwhile failed or been slow to close or restrict airspace.
There is precedent for the concern. Two commercial aircraft have been shot down in recent conflicts. Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was downed over eastern Ukraine by Russian-backed militants in 2014, and Ukrainian Airlines flight PS752 was mistaken for an incoming missile by Iranian forces shortly after takeoff from Tehran in 2020.
For passengers flying on Oct. 1, the threat felt real. Madalina Birca, 24, was flying with Emirates from Nice, France, to Dubai when the captain announced, with a slight tremble in her voice, that “due to the war situation” the flight was being diverted.
Passengers quickly switched their screens to news channels to find that Iran had started its attack on Israel. Birca followed on the live flight map as the aircraft made an abrupt turn just before crossing into Iranian airspace. She used the in-flight Wi-Fi to try to calculate the missiles’ trajectories and how close her flight had come to catastrophe.
“We were very lucky that we didn’t cross already into the airspace,” Birca said.
Birca’s was one of more than 80 flights that were diverted on Oct. 1 because of the attack. Many other flights continued uninterrupted over Iraq, Jordan, Syria and northern Saudi Arabia, with dozens passing close to launch sites in the north and south of Iran.
Radio messages from air-traffic control towers in Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain captured some of the tumult in the skies, with pilots declaring emergencies and diversions, and in some cases exclaiming that they could see the projectiles themselves.
“Missiles over Baghdad, over Najaf, over everywhere,” one pilot radioed to Baghdad air traffic controllers, according to a feed from live radio specialist, Broadcastify.
“We noticed some missiles,” a Kuwait Airways pilot said.
“Lights, rockets, I don’t know, now they’re not visible anymore,” someone radioed to pilots on Air France flight 662 to Dubai. Air France has opened a probe into why the flight was caught in the affected airspace.
While ballistic missiles reach an apex far above the altitude of a commercial jet, they pose a major risk during their ascent and descent. About 10% of Iran’s ballistics are also estimated to fail midflight, which, along with their ejected boosters, leads to falling debris. Cruise missiles typically fly at lower altitudes, endangering aircraft as they take off and land. At times, the biggest risk is posed by air-defence systems misidentifying a commercial aircraft as incoming fire.
The tally of projectiles, tracked by Osprey, accounts only for ballistic and cruise missiles. Its figures don’t include unguided rockets, mortars, artillery fire and drone attacks, each of which can also endanger flights.
The risk is ongoing. Iran has briefed regional officials that it’s preparing a response to Israel’s latest retaliatory strike that will utilise more powerful warheads. Osprey has warned airline customers that the next attack could be coordinated with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, widening the areas of airspace at risk.
Meanwhile, strikes exchanged between Israel and Hezbollah have regularly targeted or struck areas near airports, including a missile that landed in a parking lot at Tel Aviv Airport this month and an Israeli airstrike that caused an explosion near Beirut Airport’s runways a day later.
Israel’s strike against Iranian sites on Oct. 26 was also launched without official notice to airlines, though the early morning timing—around 2:15 am in Iran—meant fewer aircraft were operating. The Israeli Air Force typically consults air-traffic controllers before any strike to try to minimise risk, according to an official.
“It’s a huge concern to civil aviation. We know what happened with the Ukrainian airliner that was shot down in Iran mistakenly,” said Hassan Shahidi , president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a global, nonprofit advocacy group, calling the incident “absolutely preventable.”
Despite the surge in military activity, Middle Eastern airspace has largely remained open over the past year. The region’s already busy skies have become more important after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine locked out carriers from swaths of airspace over both countries.
Aviation safety experts have criticised the inconsistent way in which the skies have been managed by governments, including issuing late or no airspace closures.
“National security and foreign policy trump aviation security, and it happens over and over again in conflict zones,” Osprey’s Chief Intelligence Officer Matt Borie said in an interview.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and others have long imposed bans and restrictions on flights over North Korea because of the country’s tendency to conduct a handful of unannounced ballistic missile tests each year. Last year North Korea launched 37 missiles; this year so far, 52.
Days after Iran’s Oct. 1 launch, the FAA extended its ban on U.S. carriers crossing into Iranian airspace by three years until October 2027, a prohibition it first put in place after the downing of Ukrainian Airlines flight PS752 in 2020. A separate restriction that prevents flights over Syria is also in effect until 2028.
U.S. carriers aren’t restricted from flying over Iraq as long as the aircraft is traveling at a minimum altitude of 32,000 feet, according to the FAA’s latest advisory. There are no explicit warnings against operations over Jordan, Lebanon or Israel, though the agency maintains a 2021 notice that airlines “exercise caution” in those areas because of the proximity to the military situation in Syria.
A push at the United Nations to standardise rules for commercial flights over conflict zones that began after the downing of MH17 in 2014 has largely stalled, security experts say.
The U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization disputed that characterisation, citing an updated manual due this year, a meeting of its “Safer Skies” committee next year and the possible hosting of a third workshop on the subject. The measures demonstrate “the international community’s ongoing dedication to preventing future tragedies in conflict zones,” a spokesman said.
Outside of official bans, airlines typically make their own decisions about whether to fly over a conflict zone on any given day. They rely on a patchwork of advisories from regulators, intelligence from government agencies and advice from private security companies. Rerouting a flight can be a major operational challenge that adds additional fuel costs, can require additional staffing, and which disrupts preassigned takeoff and landing slots.
Even before Oct. 1, most Western carriers, including U.S. airlines, had withdrawn flights to Israel, Iran and Jordan. Many have also opted to reroute flights crossing that corridor to now fly via Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Carriers are also taking other measures. Emirates is carrying additional fuel in case a flight is required to make an emergency diversion, while European discounter Wizz Air says it will only fly in certain airspace during daytime hours when the risk of an attack is lower. Israel’s flag carrier El Al, meanwhile, has long equipped its aircraft with antimissile defence systems.
Airlines say that safety is their top priority and that any flight path is carefully considered before being allowed to depart. But they’ve also criticized governments, including after Iran’s Oct. 1 attack, for not taking adequate care to protect commercial aviation.
“It’s quite volatile,” Emirates Chief Commercial Officer Adnan Kazim said in a recent interview, adding that his airline has regularly been holding multiple security meetings a day, in addition to its daily security briefing. “Some of these kinds of situations, unfortunately they don’t come with any alert, or any pre-information and you need to manage the situation as you go.”
Israel has rerouted standard flight paths in and out of the Tel Aviv airport away from danger zones since the start of the conflict, according to Libby Bahat, head of aerial infrastructure at the Civil Aviation Authority of Israel. When it learns of potential incoming attacks, it reduces the number of flights in the airspace to make it easier for air-traffic controllers to quickly scatter aircraft to safety, Bahat said.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli Defense Force declined to comment. Aviation regulators in Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Pilots have expressed concerns. The European Cockpit Association has complained that some airlines are forcing pilots to fly routes even if they disagree with their airline’s safety assessment. The union also wants airlines to update life insurance policies, which typically don’t pay out in the case of a downing over a conflict zone.
“At any moment another disaster could happen that can take the life of innocent people again,” said Kourosh Doustshenas, whose partner died along with 175 others when Iran inadvertently shot down Ukrainian Airlines flight PS752. “We have gone through this, and this can happen any time.”
The U.S. had cautioned that morning of an increased risk of misidentification in Iranian airspace, but with most of its security team off work for Orthodox Christmas, Ukrainian Airlines failed to heed the warning.
Doustshenas has called for governments to be held legally accountable for failing to protect civilian airliners from becoming collateral damage. He also wants passengers to be informed if their flight is routed to fly over a conflict zone.
“Regular people going to the airport to catch their flight have no idea,” Doustshenas said.
Jimmy Hawkins calls himself a home-automation hobbyist. But “hobbyist” is underselling it: He’s a home-automation maniac.
Hawkins has over 200 “smart” devices throughout his Alpharetta, Ga., home. They include run-of-the-mill smart products: locks, lightbulbs, a garage door opener, and vacuums. But also some weird ones: a bidet, mousetrap, toothbrush and curtain rods programmed to close his curtains at a predetermined time.
What does he not have in his house? Lots of smart home appliances.
He and his wife, Jordan, purchased their 4,000-square-foot home in 2022 and bought a smart microwave with a sliding drawer during a kitchen renovation. But after a power outage, they never reconnected it to Wi-Fi.
“Do I really need to get my phone, open an app, hit the ‘open’ button when I’m literally standing in front of the thing and could just push the ‘open’ button?” said Hawkins, 40.
He really does not. It’s like the people who designed his microwave’s smart features have never actually used a microwave.
Smart devices like locks, thermostats and vacuums add real value by addressing a legitimate need, solving a problem or taking over an entire task. But most connected appliances have whizzed right past smart and circled back to dumb. Some offer useful tricks, like preheating your oven remotely, and downloading software updates that add cooking features. But many of the features on these appliances are useless; why would you want to start your clothes washer via app when you have likely just loaded it?
That may be one reason why consumers aren’t using their smart appliances as intended. According to a Wall Street Journal report from Jan. 2023 , only around half of the buyers of smart home appliances from two major manufacturers keep them connected to the internet. LG reported that it was less than half in 2022. Whirlpool said more than half but declined to be more specific. Whirlpool declined to update that data for 2023. Both companies said that consumer concerns over privacy, difficulty connecting and reconnecting devices when the power goes out, and the lack of robust Wi-Fi near their appliances were behind low connection rates.
Owners of these devices have different explanations. There is, they say, a general disinterest in many Wi-Fi-enabled features, like being able to turn on the oven light with their phone app, or starting the dryer while they’re grocery shopping. Take a moment and try to conceive why you’d want or need to do either of those things, besides trying to startle someone who is looking into the oven, or wanting newly dried clothes with a soupçon of mildew.
Consumers, says Hawkins, also don’t want a separate app for each appliance made by different companies. An effective smart-home hub, which lets you completely control all your smart devices from a single place, is still a ways off. Some are getting close, like Home Assistant by Nabu Casa, according to Ed de Tollenaer, who runs the Youtube channel SmartHomeJunkie. But HA is still mostly used by DIY home-automation hobbyists who are adept at programming, de Tollenaer says. A universal smart-device operating standard, called Matter, aims to let smart devices communicate with each other, but until more appliance makers get on board, it’s every app for itself.
If you want to buy a package of high-end home appliances from a single manufacturer that isn’t smart, you’re kind of out of luck. When interior designer and custom cabinet maker Vince Winteregg had a client who wanted high-end appliances without Wi-Fi in his remodeled home, it took Winteregg months to locate brands without it. He found a few individual appliances—a Speed Queen washer and dryer set, a Blue Star professional range and a Wolf steam oven. But he’s still on the hunt for a dumb dishwasher.
“I haven’t found a single client who was excited or looking for Wi-Fi connectivity for appliances,” says Winteregg, based in Clearwater, Fla.
After a surge in 2021, sales of smart home devices into the retail channel plunged then flattened, and the category of devices that includes smart appliances is not expected to see a meaningful rebound in sales until 2025, according to a study by market intelligence firm IDC. This, says Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager for IDC, is partly due to market saturation for smart home devices of all types, a dramatic slowdown in new home sales and construction (the biggest “consumer” of appliances and other smart devices), and the economic downturn since the pandemic.
Ubrani likes his smart vacuum, but otherwise he counts himself among the disenchanted. “A real smart dishwasher would be more like a smart vacuum, where you can sort of set it and forget it. It would load the dishwasher, unload the dishwasher and put away the dishes…I guess what I really want is Rosey the Robot from the Jetsons.” The closest thing to Rosey was “Assign a Task by Whirlpool” which notified you when the washing machine was done and enabled you to send a customised text message to someone…to tell them to put the clothes in the dryer.
Despite a lack of robust consumer interest in smart features, appliance manufacturers continue to embrace them. Data generated by these smart appliances and the apps that live on your phone is fed back to the maker, and can be used to determine how customers are using the product, to identify cross-selling opportunities for paid subscription services (such as recipe app Yummly, which sends recipe instructions to your Whirlpool smart oven—but why?) and to enable software updates and remote diagnostics.
Still, hope springs eternal that one day, the manufacturers will realise that lots of consumers just want an appliance that works and lasts longer than five years before going obsolete.
Hobbyists like Hawkins aren’t convinced that manufacturers will ever give up the holy grail of knowing everything about you and converting it to cash.
“They will probably figure out a way to force you to connect,” says Hawkins. “They really want this data.”
If you’re in the market for household appliances, but want a completely dumb version, you’ll likely have to go for a lower-tier model in any maker’s portfolio of products to find one. If you’re committed to owning a high-end dumb appliance, and you’re willing to spend big, try shopping European, industrial- or commercial-grade manufacturers.
If the model you want only comes smart, keep in mind that most appliances still do their basic job without being connected to the internet, but some do not. One smart-oven maker forces owners to connect to the internet in order to enable the convection roast feature, even though there is a button for it on the oven. Before you buy, make sure that every feature you want works without a connection, or without a one-time connection for a download, which would still force you to download the app, register with your personal info, etc.
Remember that if you do connect your appliance to the internet, the line up of available non-connected features could change in a future software update. Such is the case for both Yummly, which is being sunset in December, and “Assign a Task,” which is no longer available because, one assumes, a Whirlpool washing machine engineer came to his senses.
Lastly, if you want a smart appliance, and you want your smart devices to communicate with each other, look for devices that incorporate the Matter standard. More makers are joining the standard and as smart-appliance functionality inevitably (we hope) improves and becomes more useful, being able to consolidate control on a single hub instead of a half-dozen apps will make life easier. That, after all, is the point of home appliances.
As majestic Queenslanders go, Buderim House has the stately street-cred — and the blue blood history to go with it. More than a just residence, heritage-listed Buderim House is a slice of Sunshine Coast history with a colourful past welcoming British aristocracy.
Farmer Herbert Fielding had the striking three-storey home built in 1915 on a 16ha parcel of land, part of the 49ha lot his father had left him. Designed by Brisbane-born architect George Trotter, Buderim House was built by Christian Schriver and eventually added to the Queensland Heritage Register in 1993.
The landmark changed hands even before the house was completed when Fielding jumped at an offer from businessman Walter Oakes who added the iconic tower and elaborate “Buderim House” stained glass windows in the front door — both of which remain today.
Fielding ended up buying back Buderim House back in 1925 and went on to produce fruit, cattle and coffee on the land for decades. Local legend has it that the property hosted many notable guests over a century, including the Duke of Gloucester who made it his Queensland headquarters during his Australian tour in 1934.
The seven-bedroom, six-bathroom residence on 6315sq m of sub-tropical gardens and sweeping lawns underwent an architecturally designed extension in 2003 and more contemporary changes with the current owners after four years of recent restoration.
Beyond the stately wrought iron gates of Buderim House, the sheer scale of the period property is evident with a long palm tree-lined driveway leading to the grand external staircase and classic wraparound veranda framing the trophy home.
An illustration of traditional craftsmanship, the vast home covers more than 850sq m of living space with high ceilings and ornate detailing, plus plenty of modern must haves.
The kitchen has been remastered for the modern entertainer and features a 10m-long Brazilian quartzite bench overlooking the pool through original stained glass windows. This main living level is bordered by a full balcony and also houses large formal lounge and dining rooms, a second living area opening out to a rear deck and four bedrooms alongside a sleek commercial-sized laundry with a convenient drying balcony.
Down on the ground floor there is another spacious footprint with two more bedrooms, a gym, a multipurpose room, mudroom and a rumpus style space and games room. This whole lower level is flanked by a classic wraparound veranda.
A second floor retreat houses a main bedroom suite with a walk-through wardrobe to a deluxe bath ensuite and access to the fairytale turret.
The estate’s outdoor spaces are equally impressive with a European-inspired poolside retreat, pathways through lush landscaped gardens, established veggie patches, beehives, rolling lawns, and an enchanting private forest.
Located within minutes from of Buderim’s town centre, this heritage-listed property spans over 1.5 acres on Buderim’s northern escarpment, offering breathtaking vistas and an atmosphere of timeless grandeur.
Inspections of Buderim House are available by private appointment with Tristan Kurz of Homestead Prestige on 0422 804 699. Best offers are invited before December 16, at 5pm.
If you live in a city, gazing out your window at a brick wall or weed-clogged vacant lot is not uncommon. Suburbanites, too, deal with ugly views—of car-strewn driveways or masonry walls. Anyone can, however, mitigate even the lousiest vistas, say experts such as Agustina Gentili. “Focus on enhancing a window’s other qualities, the entry of light and air,” advised the Mexico City–based designer. Here, how top design experts reframe a dreary outlook to do just that.
Practice shelf love
A woeful view over a kitchen sink can truly sink your spirits, given how much time you spend there. Faced with such a situation in a house in Mission Hills, Kan., architect Chris Fein built cabinets with integrated shelving that spanned the window (above). This lets light infuse the kitchen but provides a view of objects and plants instead of the homeowners’ own driveway and the lot next door, says Fein, founding principal of Forward Design, in Kansas City, Mo.
Play with shades
Regan Baker relies on fabric blinds to distract from nasty views. The San Francisco designer hung a Roman shade that covers the top third of a home-office window. Its charming scenic pattern draws the eye away from a neighbour’s wall and, she said, “relates to the home’s hillside neighbourhood.” In another project, Baker used sheer, minimal shades in a light, neutral tone to block a dining room’s unlovely views while letting natural light filter in. What’s more, the shades’ hue so nearly matches the wall paint that they almost blend right in, says Baker, keeping the focus on a nearby landscape painting.
Erect a shield of green
When faced with a bleak view, Gentili cultivates a “domesticated jungle,” attaching window boxes to the building’s exterior, if possible, and filling them with flora. Alternatively, the designer loads window sills with lush plants to create a filter of verdure and distract from the ugliness beyond. “This also generates green-tinted shadows that dance and change with the movement of the sun,” she said.
Change the pane
A stained-glass window will, of course, blur a chain-link fence or some equally unwelcome vista. Frosted glass, too. A less costly and disruptive solution: window film. The vinyl material, available in many patterns and textures, affixes without adhesive. Choose from ribbed designs that look like reeded glass to vintage-inspired motifs like Old English (below), a leaded-glass look-alike from Portland, Ore., company Artscape ($25 for a 2-feet-by-3-feet panel). In a garden-level New York apartment, designer Nathanael Tito Gonzalez applied abstract vinyl graphics to the top of a window to diffuse the sight of foot traffic up on the sidewalk.
Meet it half way
Cafe curtains, which shield only a window’s lower half, were once out of fashion, shunted aside by contemporary top-down, bottom-up shades. Now they’re back. For a powder room in Southern California that’s tiled in sea green and floored in a checkerboard pattern, Baker executed the old-school fix to block out a rudely confrontational concrete fence. Now light streams in over the drapes’ bright geometric patterns, and the retro decor embraces the client’s love of “grandma chic,” said Baker.
The current generation of college students is facing a challenge that those who came before never had to worry about: They’ll be competing with AI for jobs.
What can they do to get ready?
After all, artificial intelligence is likely to eliminate at least some jobs that formerly served as first rungs on career ladders. “We have to accept and embrace the idea that in fact with AI we are going to have jobs that are going to be eliminated and jobs that are going to be created, and we don’t know which ones,” says Joseph E. Aoun , president of Northeastern University.
That uncertainty leaves today’s college students struggling to prepare for a workplace that is changing faster than ever. We asked a range of career counselors and employers how they would suggest students AI-proof their careers. One consensus: It’s important to master skills not easily matched by machines, such as human-style communications and the ability to understand and work smoothly with people who have different perspectives and personalities.
“In many ways the human skills are going to be more fundamental than they are now,” as machines take over some routine tasks, Aoun says.
A survey of 255 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers last year found that the three top “competencies” they sought in job candidates were communication, teamwork and critical thinking.
Communication and teamwork rely on emotional intelligence, or EQ. “AI has probably won the IQ battle,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic , chief innovation officer at Manpower Group and professor of business psychology at Columbia University, “but the EQ battle is up for grabs.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean students shouldn’t master AI. Skill in using AI as a productivity-enhancing tool can give them an edge over older workers who haven’t mastered ChatGPT and other AI programs.
But knowing how to use AI effectively isn’t enough. Here are some suggestions from the experts on how students—or really anybody—can reduce the risk they will eventually be replaced by AI.
Cultivate your ability to work with other people, including jerks
AI can write computer code, improve grammar and solve math problems, but so far it lacks the ability to mediate squabbles among colleagues, charm potential clients over cocktails or soothe angry customers. So developing those skills may be one of a job applicant’s best selling points.
Anything that requires talking and cooperating with strangers is helpful. That includes volunteering in a nursing home or an after-school youth program, or leading an on-campus club or sport. Jobs that require dealing directly with lots of other people, including jerks, are an educational opportunity. “If you’re a waiter you will understand human beings better,” says Chamorro-Premuzic.
Go wide and avoid hyper-specialisation
Focusing too heavily on one type of expertise could be a mistake if, as expected, AI eliminates lots of jobs in some specialties. It isn’t a risk only for technology fields like computer science; other fields such as accounting and finance are also being transformed by AI.
Instead, experts recommend having a portfolio of skills.
“If you have one skill, you compete with the masses that have that same one skill,” says Anna Esaki-Smith , author of “Make College Your Superpower.” In contrast, she says, “Should you stack on another skill, you become qualified for a wider range of opportunities.”
That could mean adding a minor or two to a major or going for a double major. It also could involve a strategic selection of electives. D. Raja , chief executive of CEI, a Pittsburgh information-technology consulting firm, says he increasingly looks for job candidates who have both technical skills and a grounding in business, enabling them to understand clients’ needs. An M.B.A. stacked atop a computer-science degree is one good strategy, he says.
Though a range of skills and knowledge is an advantage, it’s still important to develop deep expertise in at least one or two areas. “AI has disrupted superficial expertise,” Chamorro-Premuzic says. In other words, you have to know more than generative AI programs can spit out in a minute or two.
Show you can organise a big project and get it done
If AI will do at least some of the grunt work, people will still be needed to devise strategies and carry out complicated projects. Machines do pieces of work, but “we still need big-picture humans to put it all together,” says John Behrens , director of the technology and digital studies program at the University of Notre Dame.
To help students learn how to manage complexity, many universities require them to complete a capstone project before graduation. Those can include primary research, ambitious artworks or community-service projects.
Vanderbilt University calls such projects “immersion.” For his Vanderbilt project, Logan Glazier is converting an old school bus, once consigned to the junkyard, into an RV with solar panels mounted on the roof to power his refrigerator and other appliances.
He expects to finish the project within a few months, before graduating next spring with a degree in civil engineering. Glazier had to sell his idea to university administrators, persuade them to give him space to work on the bus, develop a plan and find materials. He watched dozens of YouTube videos and consulted with Vanderbilt professors.
He recalls the reaction he got from people at the engineering consulting firm HNTB when they heard about the project: “Wow, that’s really cool!” He got an HNTB internship in 2023 and recently accepted a full-time job at the firm starting in May, after his graduation.
Be open to new experiences
As AI and other technological changes make career paths less predictable, adaptability will be an advantage. “We don’t know what the world is going to be like in five years or 10 years,” says Behrens.
Students can develop their adaptability by seeking out new experiences, such as studying abroad or taking unconventional courses. At Carnegie Mellon University, renowned for computer science and robotics, one of the most popular electives is “Acting for Non-Majors,” offered by the Pittsburgh school’s drama department. Students have long taken the course, but now demand has soared as students see it as a plus in the job market, forcing them to shed their inhibitions and engage with other people in unscripted ways.
This year, to accommodate demand, CMU quadrupled the capacity of the course.
“It’s exhilarating,” says Emily Ma , a math major. “Acting forces you to step outside your comfort zone.” That’s particularly important for a generation of young people who were isolated during the Covid-19 pandemic and spent far more time staring at screens than they did engaging directly with people.
Be a moderate misfit
Amid all the changes AI is bringing, companies want fresh thinking. So one route to success is to be a “moderate misfit,” unhappy with the status quo and ready to innovate, says Chamorro-Premuzic. By moderate, he means that “you fit in well enough and work well with others but are not so bland and risk-averse as to lose the desire for change and progress.”
Chamorro-Premuzic advises young people not to seek employers that fit perfectly with their values but rather to “look for places they like but which they also dream of transforming and improving.”
AI is like a B+ student and can tell you what the average person would say, says Matthew Rascoff , vice provost for digital education at Stanford University. A+ work, he says, is the product of an individual brain with a distinctive voice. So he urges students to develop their own voices and identities. “The more you outsource” to AI, he says, “the less you are developing that muscle.”
By 9 p.m. on election night, it had become clear to Jason Junod that Donald Trump was returning to the White House. That night, he contacted his skin-care company’s suppliers in China to order a year’s worth of inventory for about $50,000—as much as he could afford to buy and had room to store.
His hope is that the roughly 30,000 body brushes and exfoliating gloves make it to Bare Botanics’ facility in Madison, Wis., before Inauguration Day. He thinks Trump is serious about his campaign promise to impose tariffs of 60% on all Chinese goods.
American businesses are dusting off a playbook they used during Trump’s first term: stocking up on imported goods before tariffs are enacted. They are also considering how to cope with the levies if and when enacted—whether they will be able to raise prices and whether they will need to find alternatives to their Chinese manufacturers.
“The biggest consideration is, do we stay in China?” Junod said.
When Trump began his trade war against China in 2018, U.S. businesses scrambled to front-load imports before tariffs were implemented, according to an International Monetary Fund analysis. As a result, the U.S.’s trade deficit with China—how much imports exceed exports—rose in 2018 before falling in 2019.
Bare Botanics’ body brushes are manufactured in China. Photo: Jamie Kelter Davis for WSJ
Already, exports from China surged last month, which some economists think could have been driven at least in part by front-loading amid uncertainty around election results. Outbound shipments from China rose nearly 13% in October from a year earlier, well above consensus expectations and up sharply from 2.4% growth in September.
Chinese exports growth should remain strong through the next few months because of front-loading, Wall Street economists said.
China remains the world’s top exporter of goods and the U.S. its top buyer. American companies bought roughly $430 billion of Chinese goods last year, with computer and electronic products making up the biggest chunk.
Wan Junhui, who works in marketing for an electronics manufacturer in Guangdong province, said his company has observed an increase in inquiries and “noticeable unease” from its U.S. clients recently. He said that tariffs so far haven’t affected sales significantly, but that buyers end up absorbing the levies and sometimes raising prices for their end customers.
“We’ll do our best to focus on reducing costs to help ease the situation and make it through this harsh winter,” he said.
Though China’s share of U.S. imports has declined to roughly 14% in 2023, from 22% in 2017, rising tariffs between the U.S. and China have done little to curb the overall U.S. trade deficit in global trade or China’s overall trade surplus.
The persistent trade imbalance is driven by strong demand from American consumers and weakening domestic demand in China, according to the IMF. U.S. firms have boosted their share of imports from places such as Vietnam, while China has increased exports to regions including Southeast Asia.
Tariffs aren’t paid by exporters, but rather by businesses that import products. Economists say those businesses usually pass on the bulk of the cost to consumers by raising prices.
Some economists doubt the U.S. will succeed in raising tariffs to 60% across the board on Chinese products. Economists at Goldman Sachs predict additional duties on China could average out to a 20 percentage-point increase in the effective tariff rate.
In addition to duties on Chinese goods, Trump proposed tariffs of 10% to 20% on imports from all countries.
That would be the worst-case scenario for Leah Dark-Fleury, co-founder of Stone Fleury, a natural-stone and porcelain wholesaler in San Francisco. She has been buying natural stone from the same supplier in China for two decades and imports most of her other materials from Europe.
When Trump imposed a tariff on Chinese natural stone during his first term, Dark-Fleury continued buying from China as usual. The company raised prices to compensate, but tried to not charge the full increase to stay competitive.
This week, she asked her supplier in China about the possibility of ordering about two shipping containers’ worth of natural stone under a payment plan to try to get ahead of tariffs. That could cost up to around $100,000 and last her between a few months and a year, depending on customer demand. In the longer run, she expects to raise prices on materials from China and shift some sourcing to Vietnam.
“I wish that I could buy enough to get us through the four years,” she said.
Toni Norton , owner of Fine Fit Sisters in Charlotte, N.C., sources body oil from China that is popular with customers in the summertime. She normally wouldn’t be stocking up until the new year, but is trying to order about 20,000 units before the end of the year.
If tariffs on Chinese products indeed reach 60%, Norton said she might have to stop selling body oil and focus more on her fitness-coaching services. She said she doesn’t think she has much room to raise prices on the body oil, which she mostly advertises on TikTok and sells for about $13, because “people like cheap things.”
Front-loading imports “is a short-term solution,” said Chris Tang , a professor of supply-chain management at the University of California, Los Angeles. Businesses are likely to need additional strategies in a world with persistently higher and broader tariffs.
Companies have already been moving manufacturing from China to places such as Southeast Asia and Latin America, a trend that is expected to continue—if buyers are able to find a suitable alternative to Chinese production.
A 2024 survey by Bain & Company found that 69% of chief executives and chief operating officers plan to reduce their company’s dependence on China, up from 55% in 2022.
Ryan Bursky , CEO of Lucidity Lights, a maker of lighting products in Boston, said the expectation of new tariffs is only accelerating a process under way at his company. Lucidity Lights made a strategic decision last year to begin sourcing outside of China, where it had previously done all of its production, in part because of the first phase of the trade war.
The company is on track to do about 15% of production in Cambodia this year, with plans to move about half of production out of China next year. He believes it is a better use of resources to invest in supply-chain diversification, rather than stockpiling.
Bursky said it has taken some time to find the right suppliers in Cambodia, which is still growing its manufacturing capacity and speed. But he thinks that the products made in Cambodia are better quality and that there is more attention to detail.
Joe Jurken , the founder and managing director of the ABC Group in Milwaukee, which helps U.S. businesses manage supply chains in Asia, expects China to still dominate manufacturing somewhat, even as his clients have beefed up sourcing from countries such as Vietnam, India and Cambodia.
China has developed infrastructure, communication and transaction channels that make doing business easy for Western companies, while those systems are still being developed in other countries, he said. Plus, it is hard for manufacturers in other countries to beat Chinese suppliers’ low prices.
“China will never be replaced,” Jurken said. “Other markets are an alternative.”
Junod, who started his skin-care business in 2020, has considered looking for manufacturers in Southeast Asia, but believes it would be difficult to replicate the low cost and high quality he has come to rely on from his Chinese suppliers.
“It feels like we’re being punished because there isn’t really anywhere else for us to turn domestically,” he said of Trump’s proposed tariffs. “We have no choice, really, but to pay them.”
From the Spring issue of Kanebridge Quarterly. Order your copy here
When you engage a designer like Greg Natale, there’s a level of expectation that comes with that. An international sensibility is a given, as is attention to detail and a good dose of opulence. What you might not anticipate though, is flexibility or speed.
But when Natale got the call from the owners to work on their home in Oatley in Sydney’s south, the ability to make haste was an essential element.
“The owner had grand ideas and she needed someone really quickly to help her because she had started (the build),” he says.
“I had to move walls and the bricklayers (were already) there.”
Natale describes the existing Development Application for the brand new home as ‘basic’ with little of the detail he would normally require to undertake a project.
Interior designer Greg Natale focused on European influences for this home in Sydney’s south. Image: Anson Smart
The owner had her heart set on a Georgian-style two-storey home more often seen in Melbourne suburbs such as Kew or Brighton, characterised by a symmetrical facade, with a French influence, but the approved DA came up lacking. There was also little evidence of the sense of home the owners wanted to create.
“Georgian style is classic but it’s quite simple,” Natale says.
To make the necessary changes, he submitted a Section 4.55 with council which allows for modifications to the DA and created the opportunity to ‘rejig’ the floorplan at the rear and introduce some softness to the design.
“I wanted this house to feel very soft — it’s where interior design is now,” he says. “When I started opening all the spaces at the back, we introduced these really beautiful fluted portals into the big lounge and the big dining room.”
Indeed, fluting has been used extensively in the detailing of this house, linking spaces and adding a textural layer that simultaneously makes rooms feel permanent and welcoming. It’s a strategy designed to imbue warmth to the understated soft grey palette, while letting the detailing be the hero.
The kitchen palette is restrained, relying on stonework and detailing for warmth. Image: Anson Smart
This decision to stay with the single colour for most of the living spaces makes the blue dining room and adjoining study feel even more exceptional, almost extravagant.
“The rest of the house is all quite calm and the dining room is calm too — but it’s moody,” he says. “You start with the blue and we liked all those European interiors where you have all those highly lacquered bookshelves.”
A master class in pattern and colour, Manohari Delft wallpaper from UK textiles company, Designers Guild, has been applied to the dining room walls with cobalt blue lacquered bookshelves and a coffered ceiling in the same colour.
A custom made rug from Natale’s own collection for Designer Rugs injects a softer, more organic element, with the salmon pink harmonising with burgundy-coloured dining chairs and Japan black dining table.
The dining room is a masterclass in colour and pattern. Image: Anson Smart
Next door, the small study has gone even bolder with Atlantis Aube wallpaper from the Christian Lacroix range for Designers Guild.
“The study space is the owner’s,” he says. “She had this vision for this really big pattern in that study and I wanted another room to talk to that dining room.”
While the temptation in a house like this would be to fit it out with Art Deco-style pieces and antiques, furniture is unashamedly modern. Natale says it was a deliberate move to keep spaces elegant, but light.
“She didn’t want a heavy home and if we started using Art Deco-style furniture or anything traditional it would have been very heavy — and I don’t think that look is in anyway,” he says.
“The owners both liked modern and clean design but they also love this Georgian style so it was mixing both.
“That look of mixing modern, Danish and Italian (furniture is happening) in France and even in Milan, and with those beautiful old floors and the panelling, we were definitely emulating that look.”
While the US has dominated interior design trends over the past 10 to 15 years, with names like Kelly Wearstler and Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Natale says all eyes are now on Europe.
“Ten or 15 years ago, it was all about New York and LA and Palm Springs but now it’s really looking at Europe — even Americans are looking at Europe now,” he says.
“We are probably using more European furniture now and all the European brands are here so it’s a bit easier.
“Design is definitely looking at Italy, Denmark and France now.”
Natale says interior design is focused on France, Italy and Denmark now. Wallpaper from Designer’s Guild elevates the dining room. Image: Anson Smart
Although Natale went to great lengths to finesse every aspect of this house, it’s also about what you can’t see.
“The owner does a bit of (property) developing and he has an aircon business and because of that, I really pushed the detail in the aircon,” he says. “All the aircon here comes out of slots or shadowlines of the cornice.
“The days of sticking in a grill and then Photoshopping it (out of images), I’m not interested in that. I want the air conditioning to be integrated.”
To really embed the five-bedroom property, the whole site has been landscaped with soft hedging and evergreen planting that will look good all year round.
“The landscaping really anchors the architecture and as the plants grow it will enhance that further,” he says. “In that area, there are a lot of big houses like that and if you don’t have good landscaping the house just sits there like a UFO.”
The first $100 million home sale in the U.S. happened in 2011, when Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner purchased a lavish mansion in Silicon Valley in a nine-figure deal. Back then, Milner’s buy was an outlier and set an ambitious benchmark for the luxury market. Nowadays, as the ranks of ultra wealthy individuals swell globally, $100 million-plus transactions barely cause ripples in markets like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Fla., and Aspen, Colo. More than 40 transactions have closed nationally at or above that benchmark in the intervening years, according to appraiser Jonathan Miller .
Behind those deals are a small group of real-estate power brokers responsible for marketing and selling the homes to the billionaire class. We talked to four agents whose deals have crossed the nine-figure threshold about how the biggest transactions really unfold. The interviews have been edited for clarity.
For real-estate agents, landing a high-profile or billionaire client is a painstaking and competitive process, and often means pitching against rival agents. Each agent has their own secret for getting an advantage.
JILLHERTZBERG : “You’ve got to read the paper and watch the news. I remember when Shaquille O’Neal was coming to the Miami Heat, each person on my team probably called 100 people, asking ‘Do you know Shaq?’ One person would give us the name of another person and then another person. We were lunatics.
We finally got to him and he said, ‘No, I have an agent already.’ But we convinced him to give us a couple of hours, and that no one knew Miami like we did. The first house we took him to was the one he eventually bought, a beautiful estate on Star Island.
RYANSERHANT: For the buyers we know who are trophy-home hunters, we keep our eyes on the homes in Palm Beach, Miami, Texas, Colorado and California that could go at these price points. We keep tabs on whether the owners would be willing to sell.
HERTZBERG: We went on a really big listing appointment on La Gorce Island in Miami Beach once. They asked us to come Tuesday at 10 a.m. When we showed up, there was another top agent already sitting on the patio. Another one arrived soon after. They had lined us all up at half-hour intervals. There was a little smile there to each other, like maybe we should just all do it together.
For $100 million homes, the prospective buyer pool is relatively small. That often means dealing with the same people over and over.
RAYNI WILLIAMS: It’s a very elite group of people. A lot of times they are collectors of trophy homes. Even if they don’t want to buy the property, they often will call because they want to come see it. It’s just a vanity showing. For me, it’s kind of like being a docent in an art gallery. They are coming in to admire the art. They’ll say, ‘please tell me about this architecturally significant property,’ and ask me what I know about Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect whose work is really in vogue. You’re cultivating relationships. Wealthy people love to educate themselves on all the latest and greatest.
Pricing homes at the highest end of the market is more art than science. Frequently, luxury homes come on the market for big-ticket prices, but later sell for significantly less .
WILLIAMS: It starts with the seller and what their expectation is. It’s about replacement cost, location and then data. You have to take into account how much it’s going to take to get them out of there without losing money, and the brain damage that it would take for somebody to re-create the property. People at this level are willing to pay a premium when they find something they love, because maybe they are getting older and they only have 20 good summers left, or their grandchildren are getting older. What is the value of your life if you’re under construction and you’re taking daily and weekly construction and design meetings? It’s a headache and a lot of clients tell me it can be hard on their marriage.
HERTZBERG: We’re going to go to the highest number we can possibly get without tipping over, then see how the market responds. If you tip over, that’s when you have price reductions, or you lose the listing or people get unhappy. Sometimes, you advise the seller to price at $100 million and then he speaks to other agents and they say $200 million. The seller will say, ‘We’re going to go with them, because they believe in the property more.’
RILEYWARWICK: Some agents have a strategy I don’t particularly subscribe to, which is to take a listing at all costs or at any price, then use it to market themselves. They say, ‘Well, who knows, maybe someone will pay this. Or if I can get the fish in the boat, then I can lower the price until eventually someone buys it.’
SERHANT: Sometimes the best marketing plan is to have no price, and not go officially on the market at all. Oftentimes, especially with super luxury homes, people want what other people can’t have. We’ve had buyers pay a premium because they don’t want the seller to put the property on the market. They don’t want anyone else to have it, and they don’t want anyone talking about it ever.
In 2017, a Los Angeles spec house became the highest priced home in the country when it listed with Williams for $250 million. It was the creation of Bruce Makowsky, who made a fortune selling handbags on QVC. It sold in 2019 for $94 million, plus $10 million of furniture.
Bruce Makowsky at his Bel-Air spec home, named Billionaire. Photo: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
WILLIAMS: I think his strategy was just to get it on everyone’s radar. It worked. We touched hands with every single extraordinarily wealthy person that came to L.A. at that time. They all wanted to see it. At one point, he had a $150 million offer from a local that really wanted it and Bruce didn’t take it. I think he wanted it to be the most expensive house in the world and he wanted the price to have a 2 in front of it. Years later, he ended up selling it for $104 million to one of the first people who ever saw it. (The purchase was tied to Saudi real-estate magnate Fawaz Al-Hokair. )
These houses either sell in three months, or they sell in three years. They are hard to sell quickly because it’s a discretionary purchase. It’s emotional. This isn’t a family that’s relocating from New York City and has to get here to get their kids into school in Bel-Air. This isn’t a family that needs a house. If you’re buying a $100 million-plus dollar house, you already have a really nice home somewhere.
Even the most expensive homes often need to be staged.
WARWICK: That means removing potentially offensive items. We’ve had animal mounts replaced with contemporary art and political flags or signs removed. People get very offended. I’ve had people walk into an ultra luxury home, see an animal mount and turn around and walk right out. More than once.
Many brokers approach finding a buyer for a mega-listing systematically, but sometimes it comes down to chance.
SERHANT: You’re mass marketing and you’re also target marketing. We draw up a list of names from the Forbes list, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, all the global wealth lists. We look at which companies went public over the last 24 months, which companies are about to go public. Who recently had or is about to have a liquidity event? Have there been major marriages or engagements? Sometimes, I think I know exactly who the buyer is going to be for a New York apartment, and then it’s a fracking billionaire from Texas. I’m like, really?
I once went to Masa, the expensive sushi restaurant in New York, with my wife. The couple next to us recognises me. He recognised me from TV. She recognised me from TikTok. I saw that she had a really big rock on her finger, so I asked if they were engaged. I suggested they needed a new place. Two weeks later, I sold them a full-floor apartment at Central Park Tower for $50 million.
Serhant recently had the listing for a $250 million penthouse at New York’s Central Park Tower. The triplex spans from the 129th to the 131st floor. Photo: SERHANT. Studios
Listings for trophy homes inevitably draw millions of eyeballs. Agents must determine whether interested parties are qualified buyers before they let them in the door.
SERHANT: To see a $100 million house, you need to show the ability to close in cash or that your net worth is over $1 billion.
WILLIAMS: Nobody gets into my properties unless I can prove who they are. Ninety-nine percent of people can be googled, except Asian buyers. If they can’t be googled, then we require proof of funds, usually in the form of a letter from a bank or private wealth manager on professional letterhead. It’s usually not hard to verify if somebody is real or not. If you are a mega-buyer, you have a footprint. You’ve donated money, you’ve been photographed.
SERHANT: There are con artists everywhere, there are people that want to waste your time everywhere. Even billionaires. Sometimes they are just in New York or they are in Florida and they fancy seeing something nice. They have no intention to buy.
HERTZBERG: If they say they are under the radar, we don’t take them. Nowadays, no one’s under the radar who has money.
Dealing with the global elite often requires being flexible for showings.
SERHANT: I’ve done showings in the middle of the night and early in the morning when the streets are totally empty. I had a very prominent and recognizable guy in finance who asked to see a New York property at 4:30 a.m. I understood why he did it. He knew that no one would see us. I’ve also had people wear disguises. I had somebody pre-Covid, a celebrity, who wore a baseball hat with a long black wig underneath and sunglasses. Post-Covid, everyone just wears masks.
WILLIAMS: Sometimes, a really high-profile person will register the name under their CFO or under an alias of another prominent person that would still be approved for the showing. And then when they turn up, you know who they are, and you play along.
And it can require pulling out all the stops.
WILLIAMS: I once had a guy who had just had a ton of success and he told me during the first showing that he was soon headed to Miami with his friends to celebrate. He wanted to bring them to see the house before they headed to the airport. I tried to get into the psyche of this guy and what he was into. I did some research and I found out that he loved gaming, so in the movie theatre, I put an Xbox. He had told me that he loved Japanese food, so I had catered sushi with servers throughout the property. Then, I got these gorgeous Ralph Lauren leather satchel bags as carry-ons he could take on the plane and filled them with chocolate from all the best spots in L.A., as well as marketing materials for the home. He texted me from the plane to say how incredible the experience was. And he bought the house. For $70 million.”
WARWICK: You think that these incredibly successful people are so busy, but I actually find them to be interested in every little detail of the properties we show them. One of my clients wanted to walk the entire property line of a 40- or 50-acre property, which took about an hour. They wanted to understand the land they are buying. One client was very fixated on the picture frames in the house and they wanted the seller to leave them behind, over 100 of them. The seller had to take their own family photos out of every single frame. I had another client who came in with their own water-testing kit to test the drinkability of the water and make sure the PH level wasn’t too high. They wanted the water in the kitchen to have a higher mineral content for their espresso machine.
Sometimes agents field unusual requests from sellers and buyers
WARWICK: I’ve seen more than once where a buyer will allow the seller to stay in the property or rent the property back for sometimes up to a year, or return for a holiday. I’ve had a seller want just one more Christmas in the house with their family, and the buyer allowed them that. I’ve also had deals where people trade additional houses as part of the transaction. The buyer has a property in another state, so they’ll give the seller X dollars plus their house in another state.
SERHANT: We had one very well known mega-billionaire come through a $250 million penthouse listing in New York. That apartment has the highest private residential ballroom on the planet. We’re standing in that empty room and he beckons me over with his finger. He says, ‘If I put a ping pong table in this room, will it be the highest ping-pong table on earth?’ I was like, ‘I’ll have to check, but I think it’s definitely up there.’
The Central Park Tower penthouse had its price cut by $55 million in fall 2023, a year after being listed. It is no longer on the market. Photo: Evan Joseph
WILLIAMS : We had somebody that wanted to test out the house, and use it for a weekend. I wasn’t convinced but the seller wanted to do it. The person probably wanted to do their own thing, but I couldn’t help myself. I went full on to make their experience as pleasurable as possible. I had a masseuse and a private chef come to the house to cater to them. If they wanted freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies at 3.30 in the morning, they could have them.
The typical commission for an average real-estate sale is 6%, split between the buyer’s and seller’s agents. For nine-figure luxury homes, agents often settle for a lower fee.
WILLIAMS: Taking on these big listings is expensive, and you have to have a big book of business to afford it. You can spend $100,000 out of your own pocket to market these. The commission is usually a 2% fee, but they might ask if you would do it for a little less, like 1.75%. But generally speaking, the most successful people I’ve worked with are very happy to pay the full commission. They want you to do an amazing job.
WARWICK: We fly videographers in from all over the country to film our properties, we have architects design renderings of what could be built on these properties, we do all-day photoshoots from sunup to sundown.
Any out-of-pocket expenses aren’t reimbursed or paid back should an agent lose the listing before it sells.
WARWICK: It’s a huge financial commitment and sometimes you carry these properties for a year or two. It’s a risk and that’s why sometimes we don’t take listings. If the seller is unrealistic, it’s an investment not worth making.
It’s very common for buyers and sellers at the top end of the market to ask agents to sign nondisclosure agreements, preventing them from speaking about the parties involved in the deal. However, news of the transaction often leaks regardless.
SERHANT: It’s tough to keep the deals private because of everyone that touches the transaction. Your buyer is coming in contact with door staff, the seller, the other real-estate agents that might be involved and their teams, the driver. There are points of contact everywhere. I spend a lot of time making sure that everybody in the transaction is aware of the confidentiality.
HERTZBERG: I would love for people to know that I work with these types of people, but it’s more important to work with the people. It’s funny because I’m married to a litigator and he has so many confidential relationships that I don’t know about. If I have a big deal with an NDA, I can’t tell him the name either. We just don’t go there.
Negotiations often require creativity.
WILLIAMS: I was doing a deal close to $100 million and there was a $5 million delta between what the buyer was offering and the seller was willing to accept. It’s all relative; at that price point, $5 million is not a big difference. I normally wouldn’t do this, but I decided to get them together. I had them meet in a private room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We ordered them some food, set them up and then left. By about four or five hours later— maybe some cocktails were involved— they bridged the gap and split the difference. Sometimes, you have to be smart enough to know to get out of the way. The two of them are still friends.
Dealing with the wealthiest clients comes with perks.
WILLIAMS: After I sold the Bruce Makowsky house, he called and said, ‘Meet me in your office in 20 minutes.’ He walks in with this huge, white box and plops it on my desk. Inside, there’s a coffee-table book all about his megayacht. “It’s yours,” he said. He gifted us 12 days on his yacht, which was docked in St. Barts. I took my whole family and best friends.
SYDNEY—The Reserve Bank of Australia remains jittery about the risks of higher inflation and will have little tolerance for any data that point to further delays in taming price pressures, according to the minutes of its latest policy meeting.
“Given the already lengthy period in which inflation had been above (2% to 3%) target, the board will have minimal tolerance to accommodate a more prolonged period of high inflation, even if this occurred because of factors that constrained the economy’s supply capacity,” minutes of the meeting held on Nov. 4-5 said.
The RBA left the official cash rate at 4.35% at the meeting, completing a full year since policy settings were last changed.
Economists remain confident that the RBA will start to cut interest rates in the first half of next year, but money markets are far less optimistic, with recent swap market pricing suggesting the RBA could be delayed until August.
To be sure, the minutes suggested the RBA is in no rush to cut the OCR, given numerous warnings about stubborn inflation pressures and a comment that the board will need to see more than one good quarterly inflation outcome to be confident that a fall in inflation was sustainable.
Inflation remained above the target band in the third quarter, with policymakers concerned that core inflation readings remain stubbornly high, while price pressures in the services sector of the economy remain sticky.
“Members observed that underlying inflation…remained too high and that staff forecasts did not see inflation returning to target until 2026,” the minutes said.
The RBA said it isn’t ruling anything in or out in terms of policy decisions, implying that under the right conditions, an interest rate increase might still be needed.
The minutes showed the policy-setting board explored several scenarios that might see it raise or lower the OCR.
The RBA was among the last of the major central banks to start raising interest rates following the global spike in inflation at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, while also not tightening as far as its peers over ensuing years.
Global events might yet determine the outlook for interest rates. The minutes cited a number of growing international risks including uncertainty about the policy direction of the Trump White House, the size and composition of stimulus to support China’s economy, and the potential for unsustainable growth in global government debt.
“It was not yet possible to factor in events such as these, given pertinent details were unknown and still largely unpredictable,” the minutes said.
Spending continues to trail inflation as Australians head into the final quarter of the year, new data from the Commonwealth Bank has revealed.
The CommBank iQ Cost of Living Insights report showed the amount of money being spent on essentials halved in the past year, down to 1.7 percent, driven by a fall in petrol prices, down 6 percent, and lower spending on utilities, down 3 percent.
However, there is a marked difference across age groups, with Australians between 18 and 29 years cutting back on spending more than any other age group, down 2 percent over the past year. At the other end of the scale, Australians aged between 60 and 69 years increased spending over the same period, up 3.9 percent, while spending among those over 70 rose 7.7 percent.
Wade Tubman, CommBank iQ Head of Innovation and Analytics said it was further evidence of the widening generational gap when it comes to cost of living pressures.
“Lower petrol prices and government energy relief programs have eased the pressure on essential spending and July’s income tax cuts have increased take home pay for many Australians, however there continues to be a discrepancy between the spending power of older and younger Australians,” he said. “In fact, we’ve seen those all the way up to 40 years-old cut back on spending, highlighting the large swathe of the population feeling cost of living pressure.”
The report also showed that spending had risen in some areas, with value and convenience identified as key drivers. The ‘General Retail’ category saw a 5 percent increase in spending, with online marketplace sale increasing by 20 percent, food delivery up by 6 percent and streaming services experiencing a 13 percent rise.
The news comes as Australian retailers embrace the US-style Black Friday sales. Traditionally held the day after US Thanksgiving — November 29 this year — a number of leading retailers offering ‘early’ sales deals to draw in budget conscious shoppers ahead of the Christmas season. Amazon is among those who officially kicked off their sales period today.
Choice reported the Black Friday four-day period accounted for $8.7 billion in spending last year, based on NAB data, up from $7.1 billion in 2022. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed last year’s spend in that period overtook the December period, indicating Australians are bringing their Christmas spending forward.
Demand is booming for homes in developments affiliated with luxury hotels and lifestyle brands from Ritz-Carlton to Aston Martin and Armani.
There are a total of 720 branded residence developments worldwide, a figure that’s expected to double, with another 790 project in the pipeline through 2031, according to a report from Savills Global Residential Development Consultancy, released Monday.
Dubai is far and away the leader in the space with close to 60 completed branded-residence projects, and around 70 planned developments in the pipeline. South Florida is next, with more than 40 completed projects, and another 40 developments planned from Miami to Palm Beach.
New York is third for completed projects, while Cairo in Egypt takes third for planned developments.
Other active markets include Phuket in Thailand, Da Nang and Hoi An in Vietnam, and the Riviera Maya in Mexico.
Branded residences have proved resilient even as housing markets have broadly slowed amid rising interest rates. Their hotel or brand affiliation lends its imprint of familiarity and prestige, while many are co-located with a hotel where residents can access services and amenities or put their residence in a property-managed rental pool when it’s not being used.
While the branded residence was born in North America, other markets quickly opened up to the concept. The U.S. was the most active space for branded residences through 2015, after which its share began to dip below 50% of all projects. By 2031, it’s expected to make up just 25%, with the Middle East and Africa markets expected to grow at 270%, per Savills.
Branded residences have also taken hold across Asia Pacific.
“Beyond our forecast period, we expect to see an increase in the number of branded residential developments in Asia Pacific and for the region to rival North America within the next 12 years,” said Rico Picenoni, head of global residential development consultancy at Savills. “With highly active markets, such as Vietnam and Thailand exhibiting 10% annual growth, combined, and burgeoning markets such as Japan and South Korea exhibiting more than 50% annual growth, combined, it is not unrealistic that Asia will surpass North America.”
While hospitality companies are leading the charge in branded residences, seemingly every brand in the world has jumped on the real estate bandwagon, from car brands like Porsche and Bentley in Miami, to luxury designer brands like Fendi, Armani and Bulgari, with the Bulgari LIghthouse in Dubai. In fact, Hotel brands accounted for 81% of branded residences in 2023, though its share is expected to decline to 79% in 2024, per Savills.
Among hotel companies, Marriott leaves all the others in the dust, with close to 150 completed branded residences and more than 100 in development. That’s driven by the Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis brands, two of the top three brands for luxury residences, and some of the earliest players in the game.
The Four Seasons is next for completed projects, fuelled by the Four Seasons brand, with over 50 completed and around 25 in the pipeline. Accor has fewer existing residences but rivals Marriott with more than 100 projects in the pipeline.
