The luxury property that looks after its owner

Luxury homes are integrating AI, sensors, and wellness technology to monitor and optimize residents' health, with features like gait-reading floors, skin-checking mirrors, and sleep-tracking beds. Economist Atom Go Tian argues that the next premium address will be defined less by location than by how well it cares for its occupants, as wellness real estate becomes a testing ground for technologies that eventually reach the wider market.

Opinion: As AI, sensors and wellness technology move into the built environment, the next premium address may be defined less by its postcode than by how well it cares for the people living inside it, argues economist Atom Go Tian Wellness used to be a luxury. Now most gyms have a sauna, while recovery spas with cold plunges and hyperbaric chambers are becoming more common. These are still premium experiences, but they are no longer out of reach. And the numbers bear this out. Australians spend US$4,824 per person a year on wellness, the seventh-highest in the world, according to the Global Wellness Institute https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/press-room/press-releases/the-global-wellness-institute-reveals-first-report-on-australias-wellness-economy/ . Wellness real estate is one of the country’s strongest segments: at US$25.7 billion in 2023, the country ranks second in the Asia-Pacific and fourth globally, despite a comparatively small population. Wellness has moved from the fringes into everyday Australian life. Bathhouses are becoming places to meet, and it’s no longer unusual to mark a birthday with a morning fitness class and brunch instead of a night at the club. But the cutting edge of wellness has shifted into the home. If everyone can visit a recovery spa, what are luxury buyers paying for behind their own front door? More of the same? On the surface, the answer looks like simply more. A private gym with a reformer studio and spa. Air purifiers and circadian lighting in every room. A second sauna and cold plunge off the master bedroom, on top of the ones downstairs. But that misses what is really going on. Luxury real estate has long served as a testing ground for technology that eventually reaches the wider market. Advanced air filtration was a premium feature a few years ago, and now it is becoming standard in new builds. The plunge pool and the recovery room are on the same path. Right now, the most interesting shifts are happening out of sight. The homes at the very top have started to measure the people living in them. AI systems read the air, temperature, humidity and light through the day and make constant small corrections, nudging the house back toward its healthiest state before anyone notices it has drifted. Increasingly, the house itself becomes the device. “What if your house was your wearable?” is how the industry puts it. Most of us track our health by strapping something on. These homes build it into the fabric: floors read balance and gait as you cross them, mirrors check skin and hydration while you stand at the basin, and beds track breathing and heart rate through the night without getting in the way. Sleep badly, and the house acts on it the next day, cooling the room, shifting the light, and quieting the bedroom’s electronics through the night so the space around the bed runs as still as the person in it. The house looks after you The same idea runs through everything else. The house continuously filters and conditions the air until it is cleaner than outside. It treats the water on the way in, tuning it to its use, softened and demineralised for bathing, re-mineralised and slightly alkaline for drinking. Even the lighting has a purpose, warming and dimming in the evening to help the body wind down, then brightening and cooling in the morning to wake it up, tuned to the body’s own clock rather than the switch on the wall. Some of it is not really new. The sauna and cold plunge are ordinary wellness that stand out for luxury buyers only because they can enjoy them without waiting or sharing. The rest is a genuine shift in what a home is for. A mansion is no longer just a property to put on display; it is a carefully designed tool that works for the people living in it. For now this exists in only a handful of homes, easy to dismiss as a niche indulgence at the very top. But this is the frontier, and what proves itself here is what the rest of the market gets next. Around the corner The trends of today are laying the foundation for how everyone will live tomorrow. The features will keep changing, and each one, in time, becomes ubiquitous. What doesn’t change is the direction. For generations, luxury property was about one thing: location. The coast or the city, the view or the address. In this era of wellness and technology, luxury is taking on a new meaning as homes learn to sense and care for the people inside them. A house is becoming as much about what it does as about where it stands. The next trophy home will not just be in the best place. It will be the one that looks after you best. Atom Go Tian is an Economist in Ray White’s Economics team. He specialises in transforming complex property data into clear narratives for Australia and New Zealand’s residential markets. Want to see more Forbes articles on your feed? 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