The hotel-style services you can enjoy — without leaving home
The apartment concierge goes mainstream as luxury developments take service to a new level
5 min
As downsizing has given way to rightsizing, a new breed of homeowner is exercising their right to outsource. From dog walking to gift buying, personal drivers to private chefs, today’s concierge services have become so much more than the glorified parcel-minding amenities of yore. Time poor homeowners are increasingly seeing the value of bringing the hotel lifestyle home by happily handing over daily tasks — and the real estate industry is taking note.
The global concierge services market was valued at US$647.30 million in 2022, and is predicted to hit $1.1 billion by 2032 according to Allied Market Research data. While there are no comparable Australian-only statistics, anecdotal evidence suggests our local market is set to explode as stretched-thin professionals seek out additional at-home help.
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Concierge on call
Comprehensive concierge services are now a hot commodity in lavish new residential developments, especially those targeting “rightsizers” relocating from big family homes to lock-up-and-leave apartments. Once just a smiling face in the lobby of upmarket inner-city unit blocks, the role of a concierge in 2024 goes beyond simply signing for packages and surveilling security cameras.
The Landmark in Sydney’s Lower North Shore is a $1.4 billion development offering residents access to its Club 500. The exclusive club includes traditional aides such as house keeping, restaurant bookings and car washing, with additional high end helpers like chauffeurs, event managers, interior decorators and personal shoppers.
On the riverfront in Melbourne’s Docklands precinct, Seafarers (a joint venture between Riverlee and 1 Hotels) is part five-star hotel, part residential development giving permanent residents the opportunity to cash in on the hospitality. Homeowners at the $550 million project set to open in late 2024 can tap into all the guest services of the luxury accommodation.
“Residents will benefit from a blend of the best hotel amenities with curated residential offerings, including organic pantry stocking, botanical and pet care, eco-conscious housekeeping, private chefs, in-room massages and access to the hotel’s event programming,” says Riverlee’s development director, David Lee. “The breadth of services on offer combines convenience, luxury, and responsibility into an unparalleled residential experience.”
Lee says Australian’s desire for concierge services is increasing as the needs of local luxury property buyers continue to evolve.
“As a developer, we saw a need to cater to this demand and provide residents with access to the services that allow them more time to enjoy life and experience luxury within the comfort of their homes,” he adds. “As we navigate the new norm post-pandemic, integrated services have become an enabler of a more balanced lifestyle, and we recognise that people are looking for a complete lifestyle upgrade, which begins in the home.”
A life of service
Evan Cannan, operations manager with building management company Lefand, has been a professional concierge for more than two decades, first in five star hotels and now in a residential setting. Lefand will provide building services at new residential development Akoya, a 55s project in Greenwich, Sydney.
“The types of services and facilities are becoming more high end, especially over the past five to 10 years, compared with the concierges we remember from the 1980s and 1990s,” Cannan says. “These additional services mean apartments are achieving a higher price point, but with that comes higher strata fees.
“However, most buyers are happy to pay for it because they’ve reached that stage of their lives when they appreciate it.
“These people have seen the benefits of having a concierge within their office space, or they’ve travelled the world and experienced luxury concierges in places like Dubai and Singapore.”
Although there was once a great divide between a hotel concierge and an apartment concierge, Cannan says the lines have now blurred.
“A great concierge needs to have a wealth of information at their fingertips. Without even looking having to look it up they should be able to know the best restaurants in the area, what events are on and where, and just be able to advise residents with personal requests.”
He says the job calls for plenty of patience and discretion.
“I’ve had no limit of extraordinary requests over the years including one lady who used to send me off with her ATM card to get large sums of money out for her, but sometimes it’s as ordinary as looking something up on Google Maps when you know they could have found the information themselves,” he says.
Moving forward, Cannan predicts concierge services will likely be shaped by client demand as apartment buildings become vertical villages.
“Just looking at what’s available within services around the world, I think there’s still a lot more to come to Australia,” he says. “A good concierge service is regularly having those discussions with residents about what they want and don’t want.”
Helping hand at home
Brand new apartment developments aren’t the only bricks and mortar getting the concierge treatment. Melbourne-based real estate agency Kay & Burton launched its in-house concierge service two years ago with a handful of offerings. What started as a service organising removalists and connecting homeowners with tradespeople has morphed into more than 100 preferred partners and associates.
Cath Stubbings, director of Kay & Burton’s concierge team, says due to overwhelming demand for a suite of lifestyle requirements, the team has grown exponentially.
“It started with us wanting to service our clients with their property-related needs. As a result of finding trades for them we naturally started getting asked for more lifestyle-related things,” she says, adding that the evolution has stemmed from a desire for a better work/life balance.
“Many of our clients have fairly senior roles, or run their own businesses, and they’re reevaluating what’s the best use of their time. Those working quite long hours see the value of outsourcing tasks they may have normally done themselves.”
Since COVID lockdowns, Stubbings says her clients are spending more time travelling so are seeking a professional shoulder to lean on.
“We look after their home while they’re away, which involves anything from visiting the property regularly to checking mail, watering gardens, turning lights on and off, putting blinds up and down, meeting trades, arranging cleaners or even putting food in the fridge.
“The idea is when they return they’ve got a welcoming house to come back to and it gives them peace of mind.”
As the sector grows, Stubbings says the requests are also becoming more bespoke.
“Now we even have people asking us to stock their cellars,” she says. “There’s a trade on our platform specialising in building cellars so they liaise with the client to get an idea of what types of wine they like, what balance they want, and then go about sourcing those wines and building the cellar up from scratch.”
Stubbings says with the work from home phenomenon, the need for help at home will likely continue to grow.
“Over the next three to five years we’re going to see more people calling on a wide range of concierge services as individuals travel more or spend time building businesses,” she says.
“It’ll become more common to seek out people like us who can support you getting things done around the home.”
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
4 min
OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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