Luxury Real Estate Markets Around the World
Luxury real estate has a habit of ignoring whatever the broader housing market is doing. While mainstream buyers stay sensitive to interest rates and borrowing costs, a large share of luxury deals are cash purchases, which insulates the segment from rate movements almost entirely. That's part of why 2025 produced such a wide spread of outcomes across top-tier cities — some markets posted the kind of growth that would be extraordinary anywhere else, while others cooled noticeably, and the difference came down to currency shifts, wealth migration, and lifestyle appeal rather than the usual mortgage-rate story. Here's a walk through the markets currently leading global luxury demand, and what's actually behind each one.
Dubai — still the world's biggest super-prime market
Dubai remains, by most measures, the largest super-prime real estate market on earth, and 2025 underlined why: the city recorded 500 transactions above $10 million with a combined value of roughly $9 billion, 68 of which were above $25 million. Average premium and luxury property values rose about 16% year-on-year, and the broader luxury segment had been growing even faster in prior years before that pace began to moderate.
That moderation is itself the story to watch in 2026. Analysts widely expect Dubai's luxury price growth to keep cooling from the roughly 20%+ annual rates seen recently toward something steadier, though competition for genuinely rare super-prime stock in the best areas remains intense. The draw hasn't changed: zero property tax, zero tax on rental income, and a residency pathway attached to qualifying purchases, in a city where expats already make up around 90% of the population.
Tokyo — 2025's biggest surprise
Tokyo produced the standout luxury number of the year: prices jumped roughly 59% year-on-year, by far the strongest move of any major city tracked in Knight Frank's global luxury rankings. The driver wasn't mysterious — a weaker yen made Japanese property meaningfully cheaper for foreign buyers holding dollars, euros, or other stronger currencies, and relatively low local borrowing costs added to the appeal. It's a useful reminder that currency movement alone can turn a stable, low-growth market into the fastest-moving one in the world within a single year, without anything about the underlying city changing at all.
London — recovering from a slower stretch
Prime central London spent much of the last two years working through prolonged political uncertainty, which dampened luxury activity even as other global cities accelerated. Forecasts for 2026 point to modest recovery — low single-digit growth is the general expectation after a period of flat or slightly negative movement — with demand picking up toward the second half of the year. London's underlying appeal for luxury buyers hasn't gone anywhere: deep market liquidity, English common law, and a long track record as a place wealth is stored across generations, even when short-term sentiment wobbles.
Monaco, the French Riviera, and Paris — heritage as the product
The French luxury market continues to draw both domestic and international buyers toward villas, historic châteaux, and manor houses along the Riviera, in Provence, and in Paris itself. What's shifted here isn't demand so much as expectation — buyers increasingly want architectural heritage paired with genuinely modern systems, not a beautiful facade with dated infrastructure behind it. Monaco specifically continues to attract an international clientele for whom privacy, tax treatment, and prestige matter as much as the property itself.
Switzerland — the mountains are outperforming the cities
Swiss luxury real estate rose a little over 3% on average across 31 top locations in 2025, a slower pace than the broader Swiss housing market. The more interesting number sits in the mountain resorts: prices there rose around 6%, outpacing the cities, driven largely by affluent foreign buyers rather than domestic demand. St. Moritz remains the country's most expensive address at roughly CHF 52,000 per square metre, with Gstaad and Verbier close behind. Zurich and Zug, by contrast, softened somewhat as regional employment growth cooled — a reminder that "luxury market" isn't one uniform thing even within a single small country.
Marbella and the Costa del Sol — Europe's lifestyle magnet
Marbella has carved out a specific niche: European lifestyle and climate, real space by European standards, and strong service infrastructure, all in one place. Demand into 2026 is expected from a widening pool of buyers — Belgium, the Netherlands, the Middle East, and the US remain core, with increasing interest from Poland and the Baltic states as buyers there look for a second European base. It's a market defined less by trophy-asset headlines and more by consistent, broad-based demand for quality of life.
New York, Los Angeles, and the US luxury tier
The US luxury market enters 2026 carrying real momentum, helped along by a striking structural tailwind: roughly $6 trillion was inherited globally in 2025 alone, and a meaningful share of that wealth is flowing into real estate, skewing the luxury buyer pool younger and pushing more purchases toward cash. The bar for what counts as a "luxury home" nationally now starts around $1.3 million, and considerably higher in New York and Los Angeles specifically. Foreign buyer activity in US luxury property was also up sharply, with a 44% year-on-year surge reported heading into 2026 — a notable reversal after several quieter years for international buyers in the US.
Singapore, Mumbai, and Sydney — Asia-Pacific's steady performers
Beyond Tokyo's outlier year, demand for best-in-class properties has stayed resilient across Singapore, Mumbai, and Sydney, according to recent luxury market reporting. Singapore continues to be treated as a capital-preservation market above all else — pricier than most regional peers, but valued for transparency and legal predictability. Mumbai's luxury segment has benefited from a genuinely large and growing pool of domestic high-net-worth buyers, not just international capital, which gives it a different, arguably steadier demand base than markets that lean almost entirely on foreign wealth.
The trend cutting across all of them: branded residences
One shift shows up in nearly every market on this list: branded residences — private homes attached to hospitality names like Four Seasons, St. Regis, Mandarin Oriental, and Rosewood — are gaining ground fast, particularly across Europe and other international hubs. The appeal is straightforward: hotel-level service and amenities with private ownership, which matters increasingly to a buyer pool that Sotheby's 2026 research describes as prioritizing wellness, security, and turnkey convenience over sheer size.
Why local representation matters even more at this level
Luxury property is where the gap between a generic international listing and genuine local knowledge shows up most starkly. A super-prime property's real value depends on granular, current facts — which building on which street in Marbella genuinely has staff quarters and sea access versus a listing photo that suggests it, which branded residence developments in Dubai are backed by an operator with a real track record versus a name licensed for marketing — and that's not information any portal search surfaces on its own.
This is exactly the kind of transaction where working with a broker who's genuinely active in that specific city, rather than a generalist claiming global reach, changes the outcome. On Propertylly, you can filter verified brokers by city — Dubai, London, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and more — and connect directly with someone whose knowledge of that particular market, and that particular price tier, is real.
