Family Offices and Real Estate: The 11% That Is Not 11%

Revision note, 27 September 2026#

This article was corrected on 27 September 2026. A check of its figures and attributions against the cited sources found errors, which have been corrected in the text. The full list, with what the article said and what it says now, is in the corrections section at the end.

The disambiguation#

Family office numbers warrant disambiguation discipline. Two datasets from independent sponsors arrive at the same headline figure. The UBS Global Family Office Report 2025 surveyed 317 UBS family office clients with average net worth of USD 2.7 billion and average assets under management of USD 1.1 billion, and recorded an average strategic allocation to real estate of 11 per cent in 2024, up from 10 per cent in 2023. The Goldman Sachs Family Office Investment Insights 2025, with 245 respondents (67 per cent of which report net worth above USD 1 billion), records 11 per cent in combined private real estate and infrastructure, up from 9 per cent in 2023. The Campden Wealth North America Family Office Report 2025, produced with RBC and based on 141 North American respondents with collective wealth of USD 285 billion, shows private market investments at 29 per cent of the average portfolio; its public summary does not report a separate real estate allocation. Two samples converge on 11 per cent; the third measures a wider private-markets block.

The framing matters more than the number. The 11 per cent figure is a share of the strategic asset allocation of the family office investment portfolio, not a share of total family wealth. Read plainly, that perimeter does not capture operating real estate held by the underlying family business, the residences of the principals, which for an UHNWI family can run from a single estate to a network of properties across three or four jurisdictions, or property held through private equity and infrastructure vehicles where the line item is not real estate. Victaura Research assumption: for European UHNWI households measured on a total net-worth basis, with operating real estate, residences and indirect exposure included, real estate plausibly runs in the 25 to 40 per cent range; none of the surveys cited here publishes that figure, and it should be read as an estimate. Capgemini's World Wealth Report 2025, which surveyed 6,472 HNWIs including 5,473 next-generation HNWIs, reports that 88 per cent of advisors observe greater interest in alternative assets among next-generation investors than among baby boomers. The two figures, 11 per cent and the 25 to 40 per cent estimate, are not in conflict. They describe different perimeters. Quoting 11 per cent as a total-wealth allocation misreads the source.

The intention layer is mixed, not uniformly bullish. UBS 2025 notes more ambivalence toward real estate: over the next five years 29 per cent of family offices expect a significant or moderate increase in their real estate allocation and 19 per cent a decrease, and family offices changing their allocation in 2025 planned to return real estate to its 2023 level of 10 per cent. Goldman Sachs 2025 records private real estate and infrastructure edging up to 11 per cent from 9 per cent in 2023. The regional spread is wide: in UBS 2025, US family offices held 18 per cent of their portfolios in real estate in 2024, Southeast Asian family offices 4 per cent.

Counting family offices, properly#

The population itself is contested, and the methodology matters. In a written parliamentary reply of 5 February 2025, MAS chairman Gan Kim Yong stated that the number of single family offices awarded tax incentives under Sections 13O and 13U grew from 400 at end-2020 to over 2,000 at end-2024; a further reply of 5 August 2026 put the number at more than 2,000 as at end-December 2025. This is a regulated count, drawn from formal incentive awards, with employment data attached: MAS reported that those structures employed approximately 2,200 locals in 2024. It is among the cleaner comparable figures in the global family-office landscape.

The DIFC figure is conceptually different. In its 2024 results, published on 18 February 2025, the Dubai International Financial Centre stated that the leading 120 families and wealthy individuals in its community manage more than USD 1.2 trillion of wealth, and that foundation structures rose to 671, a 51 per cent increase. Its 2025 results, published on 5 February 2026, report 1,115 foundations, up 66 per cent year on year, and 1,289 family-related entities, up 61 per cent. The honest read is that the USD 1.2 trillion is wealth managed globally by families with a DIFC presence, not regulated AUM booked in the centre. It should not be summed with, or compared to, the regulated AUM of any specific DIFC entity. The DIFC is a residence and operating platform of growing material weight; the headline number requires the caveat.

The ADGM figure is different again. Abu Dhabi Global Market reported 11,128 active licences at the end of H1 2025, with 308 financial firms and 2,664 non-financial firms among the operational entity total of 2,972. Assets under management at the regulated platforms grew 42 per cent year on year. The 11,128 is a licence count for the entire IFC, not a family office count. ADGM does not publish a family-office count in this disclosure, so citations that treat the figure as a family-office population overstate the underlying reality.

The Italian figure carries its own methodological flag. Politecnico di Milano's Osservatorio Family Office, presented on 24 September 2025, identified 244 family-office structures operating in Italy as at 1 June 2025, up 10.4 per cent year on year. Of those 244, 126 are single family offices, 96 are multi-family offices, and 22 are banking-origin structures. Geographic concentration is striking: 90 per cent of single family offices are in Northern Italy, with 61 of them (48 per cent) in Lombardy, followed by Veneto (17), Piedmont (12) and Emilia-Romagna (9); 58 of the 96 multi-family offices (60 per cent) are in Lombardy. The public summaries of the Osservatorio do not report a combined AUM figure. It is a research census, not a regulated count in the Singaporean sense, and should be cited with that flag.

A regulated count, a community-wealth estimate, a licence count and a self-described census are four different things. They are routinely conflated. They should not be. The honest reading of the four jurisdictions side by side is that Singapore offers a measurable regulated population, DIFC offers a residence and operating gravity that has scaled materially, ADGM offers a fast-growing operating platform, and Italy offers a domestic family-office layer increasingly relevant to inbound European UHNWI capital. The data does not say the same thing about each, because it is not measuring the same thing.

Why real estate, structurally#

The case for property inside a family-office portfolio is rarely cyclical. It rests on four observable properties of the asset class that other allocations approximate but do not replicate. Real estate is tangible, which matters for a class of investor whose portfolio decisions are taken on a multi-generational horizon and whose accountability is to heirs, not to a quarterly investment committee. It is, in the right jurisdictions, an inflation hedge of mechanical character: replacement cost rises with the broader price level, and in markets with binding supply constraints the income stream re-prices with it. It is a vehicle for intergenerational transfer with a tax and legal architecture that, while increasingly transparent, remains differentiated from financial assets. And it is the asset class most directly connected to identity, place and family memory, which is not a financial argument but is the argument that, in practice, principals make to themselves.

The structural argument is anchored in scarcity, not in momentum. Knight Frank's PIRI 100 (Prime International Residential Index 2026) recorded global prime growth of 3.2 per cent in 2025, outperforming the mainstream market for a second consecutive year. The headline masks a sharp bifurcation: Tokyo led at +58.5 per cent, Dubai rose 25.1 per cent, Lake Como 6.5 per cent, Milan edged up slightly, and London prime fell 4.7 per cent. The locations where supply is constrained by statute or constitution behave differently from the locations where supply is constrained by master-developer programme. The family-office allocation to real estate, when it is honest, is an allocation to that structural asymmetry. The mechanics are detailed in our companion piece, Scarcity as Value Protection.

The generational transfer reinforces the underlying demand. Cerulli Associates projects that USD 124 trillion of wealth will transfer in the United States through 2048, a simple average of roughly USD 5 trillion a year, with USD 62 trillion of it expected to come from households that are currently high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth. The UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report 2025 separately estimates that billionaires will transfer approximately USD 6.9 trillion globally by 2040, at least USD 5.9 trillion of it to children. For real estate specifically, the implication is that demand is not contingent on a single demographic moment. It is a structural flow stretched across two decades, with each tranche translating into property purchases distributed across residence, investment and operating perimeters.

The multi-jurisdictional thesis at the operating level#

The most under-quoted data point in the 2025 cycle is operational, not allocative. KPMG's 2025 Global Family Office Compensation Benchmark records that 44 per cent of family offices now operate from two or more locations, against 30 per cent in 2023. That is a 47 per cent relative increase in two years. It is, structurally, the data point that confirms the multi-jurisdictional thesis at the operating level: families are not simply diversifying portfolios across geographies, they are operating their family offices across geographies. The booking centre, the residence centre and the operating centre are three distinct functions, and the population that designs its platform around the distinction has materially expanded.

The cross-border booking map is also moving. The Boston Consulting Group's Global Wealth Report 2026, published on 27 May 2026, recorded Hong Kong overtaking Switzerland for the first time as the largest cross-border booking centre, with cross-border wealth booked in Hong Kong up 10.7 per cent in 2025 to USD 2.9 trillion and Switzerland at about the same level. The two numbers are not drawn from the same population: 59 per cent of Hong Kong's cross-border wealth comes from mainland China. The UAE booking centre holds about USD 0.7 trillion, after cross-border wealth rose 11.1 per cent in 2025. For family offices, the implication is that the booking decision is no longer a default choice of Geneva, Zurich or London. It is an active selection across a wider menu, taken against an explicit reading of the booking, residence and operating functions per family.

Real estate sits inside that map as the function least separable from residence. A family that books in Hong Kong, resides in Italy under the 24-bis flat tax regime and operates a family office out of Milan or Como holds its prime real estate predominantly in the residence jurisdiction, because residence and property are the two functions that interact most directly with daily life. The 11 per cent allocation sits inside the investment portfolio; the 25 to 40 per cent total-net-worth range, a Victaura Research assumption, adds the operating real estate of the underlying family business and the residences distributed across the platform. The portfolio map and the platform map are not the same map, and confusing the two is a recurring analytical error.

From core to value-add: where execution becomes the return#

As allocations deepen, the conversation shifts. A first-tranche real-estate allocation is typically core: stabilised, income-producing, geographically familiar, sized to a single property or a small portfolio. A deepened allocation moves towards value-add and selective development, in which capability, not just capital, drives outcomes. Victaura Research view: the conversion of constrained land into finished, compliant, deliverable product is where the value of a scarce site is realised, and that conversion is not a passive position. It is an operating discipline.

The institutional argument is execution against constraint. A scarce site is a scarce asset only when it is delivered as a finished, scarce product. That is true on Lake Como, where Italy's Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape (Legislative Decree 42/2004, Article 142, paragraph 1, letter b) imposes a 300-metre landscape-protection band from the shoreline and the supply of new lakefront product is structurally constrained by statute. It is true on Zanzibar, where all land is public, freehold is not available to foreign investors, and leasehold runs to a maximum of 99 years under the Land Tenure Act 1992, with projects approved through the Zanzibar Investment Promotion Authority. It is true on Gili Air, where the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 (Law No. 5 of 1960, Articles 21 and 26) reserves Hak Milik freehold for Indonesian citizens and bars foreigners from holding it. It is true on Marjan Island in Ras Al Khaimah, where supply is controlled by the master developer in the corridor of the Wynn integrated resort. The constraint is the asset. The execution is the return.

This is the investor base the analysis addresses. Institutional, family-office and private-capital allocators seeking exposure to scarce real estate, who can hold operators to published assumptions and documented constraints. The detailed market-by-market analysis is in Scarcity as Value Protection, with the broader cross-border map in our 2026 dossier, Where the World's Wealth Is Moving.

The ESG layer, honestly read#

The sustainability question deserves a candid treatment, because the public narrative and the private behaviour have diverged. The Wharton Family Office Survey 2024 found that about 35 per cent of respondents have made or plan to make ESG investments. Stanford research published in January 2025 found that support for ESG among young US retail investors fell sharply: the share of millennial and Gen Z investors who considered it extremely important for fund managers to influence companies' environmental priorities dropped from 44 per cent in 2022 to 11 per cent in 2024. The BNP Paribas ESG Survey 2025, covering 420 institutional investors, found that 87 per cent report unchanged ESG and sustainability objectives, and that nearly half of those have become less vocal about their process and achievements, a phenomenon the trade press has labelled greenhushing.

For real estate specifically, the honest framing is operational rather than ideological. The drivers that shape long-duration real-estate underwriting in 2026 (climate exposure, water security, energy performance, embodied carbon, regulatory pathway) are present whether the allocation is labelled ESG or not. For coastal resort markets such as the east coast of Unguja, sea-level rise and shoreline erosion are site-level inputs. None of this invalidates the destination thesis for resort markets. It does mean that asset selection at the parcel level, setback discipline and a light operational footprint are not optional. They are underwriting requirements. The family office that prices these inputs as physical-risk underwriting, rather than as ESG branding, arrives at the same answer with greater institutional clarity.

Scarcity in a transparent world#

The transparency reset is the structural backdrop. Eighteen months of statute have reordered the cross-border wealth map. The United Kingdom abolished a 226-year-old non-domiciled regime on 6 April 2025. The EU's DAC8 directive and the OECD Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework began applying on 1 January 2026; as of 14 September 2026, 46 jurisdictions were committed to first CARF exchanges by 2027 and 77 in total by 2029 (OECD Global Forum). Spain abolished its Golden Visa programme by Ley Organica 1/2025 in April 2025. Malta citizenship-by-investment was struck down by the Court of Justice of the European Union in case C-181/23 on 29 April 2025. Victaura Research assumption: the privacy-via-opacity model has a finite horizon, closing structurally by approximately 2028.

What this implies for the family-office real-estate allocation. When opacity is removed as a structural advantage, the remaining advantages are the ones that cannot be manufactured. Scarcity, geographic and statutory and constitutional, survives transparency. Marketing scarcity does not. The 300-metre landscape band on Lake Como is 300 metres whether the buyer is reported to OECD CRS or not. Hak Milik in Indonesia is reserved to citizens by statute, not by a policy that can be unwound by treaty. Zanzibar leasehold is statutory. The family office that designs its real-estate allocation against structural rather than marketing scarcity holds an allocation that survives a transparency reset, a tax-regime revision and a single-jurisdiction event.

The migration narrative requires its own caveat. The Henley & Partners Private Wealth Migration Report 2025, published on 24 June 2025, projected 142,000 millionaires relocating across borders in 2025 and a UK net outflow of 16,500. Dan Neidle (Tax Policy Associates, 27 July 2025) documented a statistical anomaly in the underlying New World Wealth data that he put at roughly one in 240,000. In August 2025 Henley announced an independent audit and review of New World Wealth's methodology and data without naming the reviewer, and its 2026 report, published on 16 June 2026, replaced millionaire migration estimates with a Global Wealth Mobility Framework. The Henley dataset is treated in Victaura Research as directional only. For an allocator, the conclusion is operational: a finite supply of finished prime product, an international demand base, and a regulatory environment that constrains how quickly supply can expand. The driver of value is execution against constraint, not the headline number of any single migration report.

What this means for an allocator#

For a family office or principal advisor, the practical implications follow from the disambiguation. First, the 11 per cent allocation is a starting point, not a ceiling. On a total-net-worth basis, including operating real estate, residences and indirect vehicles, Victaura Research assumes European UHNWI exposure runs materially higher; the platform should be designed against the perimeter that is actually held, not the perimeter that the headline number describes. Second, in Victaura Research's view, the locations with structural scarcity behave differently from the broader market. The allocator that prices Lake Como, Nungwi, Gili Air and Marjan Island as four different regulatory grammars, four different climate horizons and four different buyer profiles holds a portfolio with diversification across constraint type, not just across geography.

Third, the operator is the institutional partner that documents what it can deliver and discloses what it cannot. In Victaura Research's view, a more transparent regime raises the value, for any allocator, of operators that publish their assumptions, declare their conflicts and disclose the constraints of the markets they work in. Fourth, the platform decision is not a single decision. Booking, residence and operating are three functions, and the family-office population designing its platform around the distinction has expanded from 30 per cent in 2023 to 44 per cent in 2025. Real estate sits inside that map as the function least separable from residence; the allocation should be sized to where the family actually lives, not to where the headline allocation suggests it should live.

Skin in the game disclosure. Victaura, through its parent Greystone B.V. (Netherlands), develops projects on Lake Como (Italy), in Nungwi, Zanzibar (Tanzania), on Gili Air and in Uluwatu, Bali (Indonesia), and holds an off-plan capital position on Al Marjan Island, Ras Al Khaimah (UAE). Readers should assume commentary may be influenced by, or benefit, these positions. This document is classified as marketing material under MiFID II Article 24(3). It is not investment advice.

Corrections, 27 September 2026#

What the article said and what it says now. The published version described the 11 per cent real-estate figure as a median shared by UBS, Goldman Sachs and Campden; it now states that it is an average in the UBS Global Family Office Report 2025 (2024 allocation) and a combined private real estate and infrastructure allocation in Goldman Sachs Family Office Investment Insights 2025, and that the Campden Wealth and RBC report gives private markets at 29 per cent with no separate real estate figure. The 25 to 40 per cent total-net-worth exposure, a central point of the article, was presented as an observed range; no source publishes it, and it is now labelled a Victaura Research assumption throughout. The published version said UBS family offices intended to increase real estate exposure; UBS reports 29 per cent expecting an increase and 19 per cent a decrease over five years, and a planned return to 10 per cent in 2025. The Capgemini sentence on a NextGen preference for real assets was replaced with what the report states on alternatives. Italy: the published version gave a July 2025 date, EUR 1,015 billion of AUM and 148 structures in Lombardy; the Politecnico di Milano data, as reported by MondoInstitutional, are dated 1 June 2025, include no AUM figure in the public summaries, and place 61 single family offices and 58 multi-family offices in Lombardy. DIFC figures were dated to the 2024 results and updated with the 2025 results (1,115 foundations, 1,289 family-related entities). Knight Frank: London prime fell 4.7 per cent in 2025, not 2.2 per cent, and Milan edged up slightly rather than rising 0.4 per cent. BCG: Hong Kong and Switzerland are both at about USD 2.9 trillion, not USD 2.95 and 2.94 trillion, and the UAE is at about USD 0.7 trillion, not USD 721 billion. Cerulli's USD 124 trillion is a United States estimate, with USD 62 trillion from HNW and UHNW households, replacing an unsourced USD 25 to 35 trillion; the UBS USD 6.9 trillion is the total billionaires are expected to transfer by 2040. The Wharton 30 and 60 per cent ESG figures, the Western Indian Ocean sea-level figure, the Unguja erosion rate, the Deloitte Private paraphrase, the UBS co-investment statement and the 1,800 to 3,800 UK outflow estimate were removed because no source supports them. CARF and DAC8 began applying on 1 January 2026 but did not go live across 76 jurisdictions on that date; the OECD lists 46 jurisdictions with first exchanges by 2027 and 77 in total. Hak Milik is reserved to citizens by the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960, not by the Constitution, and Zanzibar leasehold rests on the Land Tenure Act 1992. The Henley paragraph now records the August 2025 review announcement and the June 2026 report, which dropped migration estimates. Several reference links were corrected.

A further review on the same day refined some of the corrections above and fixed further points. The article dated the USD 1.2 trillion managed by the leading 120 families in the Dubai International Financial Centre community to end-2025 in the key takeaways and, ambiguously, in the hub table; the figure comes from the DIFC 2024 results published on 18 February 2025, and both now say so, while the 1,115 foundations remain dated to the 2025 results of 5 February 2026. The article said the UBS Global Family Office Report 2025 showed more ambivalence toward real estate than toward other asset classes; the report states that there is more ambivalence toward real estate, with 29 per cent of family offices expecting an increase and 19 per cent a decrease, and the sentence now follows that wording. The Knight Frank page reporting that Milan edged up slightly in 2025 has been added to the references.