BY DEEPAK ANAND,
CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, HOUSR
NEW DELHI | 3 AUGUST 2026
For most of its history, hospitality has been defined by a transaction with a beginning and an end: a guest checks in, stays a few nights, and checks out. Everything the industry built service standards, loyalty programmes, design language was engineered around that short, intense window. That definition is now being rewritten. Increasingly, the people hospitality serves aren’t just travellers passing through a city; they are residents who live in it, and who have decided they don’t want to give up the comforts of a well-run hotel just because they’ve gone home.
This shift didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of three forces converging at once changing lifestyles, restless capital, and a real estate industry looking for a new value proposition.
A New Kind of Resident:
Today’s urban resident the young professional relocating for work, the family that has outgrown the idea of “owning everything,” the retiree who wants community without the burden of upkeep is asking their home to behave more like a serviced experience than a static asset. They want housekeeping on demand, F&B without a kitchen commitment, wellness built into the building rather than bolted on, and a sense of community that doesn’t depend on knowing your neighbours for a decade first. In many ways, this is simply hospitality’s own playbook service, design, curation applied to a much longer stay.
The numbers reflect this shift. Branded residences, once a niche add-on for a handful of ultra-luxury hotel groups, are now among the faster-growing categories in global real estate, with completed and pipeline projects worldwide numbering well over a thousand and expanding at a pace ahead of the hotel and residential sectors individually. Closer home, India’s managed co-living stock has crossed several lakh beds and moved beyond Bengaluru and Gurugram into tier-2 cities, where a segment of young professionals is opting for fully managed, tech-enabled homes over the traditional PG or unfurnished rental though this remains one option among many, not yet the default.
Where Hospitality, Real Estate and Technology Meet:
What makes this moment different from earlier attempts at “serviced living” is convergence. Hospitality brands bring service DNA and guest-experience standards perfected over decades. Real estate brings land, capital structuring, and long-duration assets. Technology ties the two together app based bookings, smart access, predictive maintenance, dynamic community engagement at a scale no hotel concierge desk could ever manage alone.
This convergence is producing a distinct category: not a hotel, not an apartment block, but hospitality-led living residential product designed and operated the way a hotel is run, rather than the way a building is typically managed. Whether it holds up as a durable category or proves to be a cyclical enthusiasm will depend largely on execution over the next real estate cycle, not on branding alone. What is clear for now is that the operator, not just the developer, has become a more central determinant of an asset’s value.
Why Capital Is Paying Attention:
For developers and investors, the interest is largely commercial. Branded and hospitality-managed residences have tended to command a premium over comparable unbranded stock industry estimates put this in the region of 30 percent on average, higher in resort locations and a known operator can reduce a buyer’s uncertainty about future service quality, which in turn can support sales velocity. For institutional capital, hospitality-led living also offers recurring, service-linked revenue layered on top of a real estate asset, rather than only a one-time sale or a plain rental yield. That combination — real estate’s asset stability alongside hospitality’s operating income — explains why REITs, private equity, and listed hospitality players are studying the category closely, even if actual capital deployment so far has been concentrated among a relatively small set of players.
The Harder Conversation: Scaling It Right:
None of this is easy to scale, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Service consistency, which is hard enough across a single hotel, becomes exponentially harder across hundreds of residential units spread across cities, each with residents who expect five-star reliability at a fraction of hotel-room turnover economics. Regulation hasn’t caught up either — in India particularly, co-living and hospitality-led residential formats often sit in a grey zone between housing law and commercial hospitality norms, creating friction for operators and uncertainty for investors. Then there’s the talent question: running a residential community requires a different, more sustained kind of hospitality skill than a three-night hotel stay, and the industry hasn’t yet built enough of that talent pool. Unit economics remain unforgiving too — the amenities and service layer that create the premium also create the cost base that can quietly erode it if operators aren’t disciplined, and several operators who scaled aggressively in the last few years have had to pull back and re-price their offering as a result.
For all the enthusiasm around this category, it remains an unproven model at scale. Most of the evidence so far comes from a handful of markets and a relatively short track record — enough to suggest genuine structural demand, but not yet enough to say which operating models will hold up over a full real estate cycle. The next few years will likely separate operators with disciplined, service-first execution from those that treated hospitality-led living as a branding exercise rather than an operating one.
Advertisement:
Add Comment