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

The disambiguation#

Family office numbers warrant disambiguation discipline. Three datasets, drawn from three independent sponsors, converge on the same headline figure. The UBS Global Family Office Report 2025 surveyed 317 single family offices with average AUM of USD 1.1 billion and average net worth of USD 2.7 billion, and recorded a strategic asset allocation to real estate of 11 per cent. 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, sponsored by 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, with real estate a material component of that block. Three samples, three sponsors, one structural reading.

The framing matters more than the number. The 11 per cent figure is calculated inside the investment portfolio of the family office. It excludes operating real estate held by the underlying family business. It excludes the habitual 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. It excludes real estate accessed through private equity and infrastructure vehicles where the underlying asset is property but the line item is private equity. For European UHNWI households measured on a total net-worth basis, with operating real estate, habitual residences and indirect exposure included, the figure typically runs in the 25 to 40 per cent range. Capgemini's World Wealth Report 2025, drawing on a sample of 5,473 HNW respondents, separately confirms that NextGen wealth holders show a stronger preference for real assets than the prior generation. The two figures, 11 per cent and 25 to 40 per cent, are not in conflict. They are measuring different perimeters. Advisors who quote 11 per cent as a total-wealth allocation are misreading the source.

The intention layer is consistent across cycles. UBS 2025 reports that a meaningful share of surveyed family offices intend to increase real estate exposure in the period ahead, with developed-market property the most cited destination. Goldman Sachs 2025 notes that allocations to private real estate and infrastructure edged higher into 2025, with the move framed as a search for current yield rather than capital appreciation. Knight Frank's Wealth Report Attitudes Survey, in its 2025 edition, reports that surveyed family offices hold multiple properties as a standard rather than an exception; the often-cited four-properties-on-average figure is widely repeated but not directly confirmed in the public Knight Frank summary, and should be cited with that caveat.

Counting family offices, properly#

The population itself is contested, and the methodology matters. Singapore's Monetary Authority confirmed in parliamentary testimony that the number of single family offices awarded tax incentives under Sections 13O and 13U grew from approximately 400 at end-2020 to over 2,000 at end-2024. This is a regulated count, drawn from formal incentive awards, with employment data attached: those structures hired approximately 2,200 locals in 2024. It is the cleanest comparable figure in the global family-office landscape.

The DIFC figure is conceptually different. The Dubai International Financial Centre has published a figure of approximately USD 1.2 trillion in community wealth associated with the top 120 families resident through DIFC structures, alongside 671 family foundations, a 51 per cent year-on-year increase. The honest read is that this is an estimate of total family wealth associated with DIFC-resident vehicles, not regulated AUM. The two numbers, USD 1.2 trillion in community wealth and the regulated AUM of any specific DIFC entity, should not be summed or compared. 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. Citations that treat the figure as a family-office population overstate the underlying reality by roughly an order of magnitude.

The Italian figure carries its own methodological flag. Politecnico di Milano's Osservatorio Family Office, in its fifth annual edition published September 2025, identified 244 family-office structures operating in Italy as of July 2025, up 10.4 per cent year on year, with combined AUM in the range of EUR 1,015 billion. Of those 244, 126 are single family offices, 96 are multi-family offices, and 22 are banking-origin structures aggregating multiple families. Geographic concentration is striking: approximately 90 per cent are located in Northern Italy, with 148 in Lombardy alone (60 per cent of the regional total in the multi-family-office sub-segment), followed by Veneto (11), Emilia-Romagna (7) and Lazio. The Politecnico methodology is intentionally inclusive of self-described family offices and should be cited with that flag; it is not a regulated count in the Singaporean sense.

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 at +25.1 per cent, Lake Como at +6.5 per cent, Milan at +0.4 per cent, London prime at -2.2 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](/en/insights/scarcity-as-value-protection/).

The generational transfer reinforces the underlying demand. Cerulli Associates places the North American intergenerational wealth transfer at approximately USD 124 trillion through 2048, or roughly USD 5 trillion per year of flow. UBS Billionaire Ambitions 2025 separately projects USD 6.9 trillion of transfer to heirs by 2040. The UHNW share of the cumulative US transfer is estimated at USD 25 to 35 trillion. Dr. Rebecca Gooch, Global Head of Insights at Deloitte Private, has observed that the generational handover is no longer a future event but a current operating reality for the wealth industry (paraphrased from Deloitte Private public commentary). 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 27 May 2026, recorded Hong Kong overtaking Switzerland in cross-border booked assets, at USD 2.95 trillion against USD 2.94 trillion. The two numbers are not measuring the same population: Hong Kong's figure is predominantly mainland-Chinese onshore wealth booked in Hong Kong custody, while the Swiss figure reflects internationally diversified UHNWI custody in the historical sense. The UAE booking centre has grown to approximately USD 721 billion. 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, when it is honest, is concentrated in residence-anchored property; the 25 to 40 per cent total-net-worth exposure includes the operating real estate of the underlying family business and the secondary residences distributed across the platform. The portfolio map and the platform map are not the same map, and confusing the two is the second most common analytical error in current private-client marketing.

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 returns. UBS 2025 records that family offices increasingly access alternatives through co-investment alongside specialist operators, rather than through pure fund vehicles, and the same structural preference applies to real estate. The asset that compounds at the highest risk-adjusted rate is the one converted from constrained land into finished, compliant, deliverable product. 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 the Zanzibar Investment Promotion and Protection Authority Act 2018 restricts foreign ownership to leasehold of up to 99 years. It is true on Gili Air, where Article 33(3) of the 1945 Indonesian Constitution and the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 reserve Hak Milik freehold for citizens. 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 Victaura is built for. Institutional, family-office and private-capital allocators seeking disciplined exposure to scarce, high-quality real estate, with operators that publish their assumptions, document their constraints and decline to invent their numbers. The detailed market-by-market analysis is in [Scarcity as Value Protection](/en/insights/scarcity-as-value-protection/), with the broader cross-border map in our 2026 dossier, [Where the World's Wealth Is Moving](/en/insights/where-the-worlds-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 approximately 35 per cent of family offices have made or plan to make ESG investments, while only around 30 per cent considered ESG factors in the investment process. The comparable figure for the wider institutional respondent base in the same survey was approximately 60 per cent. The gap, of roughly 25 to 30 percentage points, is the documented family-office say-do gap on sustainable investing. Stanford 2025 research, separately, recorded a measurable cooling of NextGen interest in sustainable investing relative to the 2021 to 2022 peak, against expectations. BNP Paribas 2025 institutional research found that approximately half of surveyed institutional allocators have become less vocal about ESG in their external communications, 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. Sea-level rise in the Western Indian Ocean is running at approximately 3.5 mm per year, roughly 4 per cent above the global mean (Nature Communications Earth & Environment, 2026). Coastal erosion on the east coast of Unguja has been measured at approximately 15.6 metres per year between 1990 and 2020. 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 European Union and the OECD activated the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework and DAC8 across 76 jurisdictions on 1 January 2026. 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. 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 Como is 300 metres whether the buyer is reported to OECD CRS or not. Hak Milik in Indonesia is constitutional, not 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 projects roughly 142,000 millionaires relocating across borders in 2025. Dan Neidle (Tax Policy Associates, July 2025) documented a 1-in-240,000 statistical anomaly in the underlying methodology, and Henley's announced independent peer review remains, as of May 2026, without a named auditor and without published outcome. The Henley dataset is treated in Victaura Research as directional only. Triangulating CenTax microdata against Companies House director resignations and HMRC self-assessment late-filing patterns produces an effective UK HNW outflow band of 1,800 to 3,800 for the twelve months to April 2026, an order of magnitude below the Henley implied 16,500. For an allocator, the conclusion is operational: a finite supply of finished prime product, an international demand base that is durable and growing, a regulatory environment that ensures supply will not expand without discipline. 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, habitual residences and indirect vehicles, 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, the locations with structural scarcity behave differently from the broader market, and their behaviour is less correlated to short-term cycles. The allocator that prices 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. The next decade of private real estate will reward operators that publish their assumptions, declare their conflicts and decline to invent their numbers. The transparency regime now permanent means the institutional buyer will allocate to operators that work in scarce markets and disclose the constraints honestly. 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), holds active commercial positions in each of four markets discussed across our scarcity coverage: Lake Como (Italy), Zanzibar (Tanzania, Nungwi area), Gili Air (Indonesia) and Ras Al Khaimah (UAE, Al Marjan Island). Readers should assume that commentary on these markets may be influenced by, or may benefit, Greystone's existing positions. This document is classified as marketing material under MiFID II Article 24(3). It is not investment advice. The detailed market analysis is in [Scarcity as Value Protection](/en/insights/scarcity-as-value-protection/); the cross-border map is in [Where the World's Wealth Is Moving](/en/insights/where-the-worlds-wealth-is-moving/); the operating philosophy is set out in [Our Approach](/en/our-approach/); the route to co-investment is described in [Invest with Victaura](/en/invest-with-us/).