People are paying more for luxury and have less left to enjoy it with

The strange fact about the last few years is that people have been trading up and running out of money at the same time. Both halves are true, they are not a contradiction, and taken together they explain why so many expensive amenities sit unused in expensive buildings.

What the rental numbers actually say

The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard published America's Rental Housing 2026 on 2024 data. Four findings matter here.

The trading-up half is real too

Bain's 2026 luxury study puts global luxury spending at 1,443 billion euro in 2025, with personal luxury goods roughly flat and the growth sitting in experiences: consumer sentiment favoured experiences over things by about 1.5 to 1 in early 2026. People are not spending less on feeling well-off. They are spending it differently, and increasingly on something that happens rather than something that sits on a shelf.

Fitness is where that is most visible. In June 2026 L Catterton, the private-equity firm backed by the family office of LVMH's Bernard Arnault, entered exclusive talks over Hyrox, at a reported valuation between 700 million and 1 billion euro.

Worth being precise, because the shorthand gets this wrong. That is not LVMH buying a gym chain. It is an Arnault-backed investor, in talks rather than completed, for an indoor fitness race series that grew from 650 participants in 2017 to a reported 425,000 to 550,000 athletes across 80-plus events in 30 countries in the 2024–25 season. The thing attracting a billion-euro valuation is not a building full of equipment. It is an event people pay to turn up to.

The counter-example that keeps this honest

The tidy version of this story is that luxury fitness always wins. It does not. The same investor's Chinese gym chain, Will's Fitness, bought in 2018 for a reported three billion yuan, collapsed in November 2024. More than a hundred locations at its peak; twelve still open in Shanghai by that December; refund requests in the hundreds of millions of yuan.

Caixin's account names the mechanism: Will's relied heavily on multi-year memberships and expensive packages, and that reliance is cited as a cause of the instability. A premium fitness offer sold on prepaid commitment, backed by luxury money, still failed. What people would pay for was the experience, not the subscription attached to it.

What this means for a building

Put the two halves together and the picture for an operator is uncomfortable but useful.

Your residents chose the more expensive building. They will pay for things that feel good and actually happen. And they arrive at the amenity floor having already spent the money, which in the hardest-pressed households means a couple of hundred dollars a month covering everything.

So the amenity that works in 2026 is not the one with the highest specification. It is the one with the lowest barrier between wanting it and having it. A gym that costs nothing extra gets used. A pool that costs nothing extra gets used. An amenity carrying its own monthly fee is asking a resident to make a second financial decision after the one that already stretched them, and a meaningful share of them will decline it and quietly resent the building for asking.

This is also why we think charging per use rather than by subscription is not a pricing gimmick. A resident with $210 left after rent can find three euro for an iron on the evening they need one. Committing fifteen euro a month against a need they cannot forecast is a different question, and most of them answer it with no.