Phuket has 35 branded residence projects. What does that really tell you?

A branded residence is a home built and run with a hotel or design brand attached. The brand does not just go on the sign during construction: it sets the standards and runs the building after you have bought. On Phuket that covers apartments, villas and whole resort estates.

The 35 comes from Knight Frank, in its Residence Report 2026/27. It counts branded projects on the island and ranks Phuket fourth in the world. London, fifth, has 30. Bangkok, tenth, has 22. Those are that firm’s numbers, and we have not checked them ourselves.

A count of projects is a count of names announced. It cannot tell you how many homes exist, because size is not part of it. So “fourth in the world, ahead of London” means fourth by number of projects. It does not mean Phuket has more branded homes than London.

Demand does follow the airport, and that part is easier to trust: flights into Phuket are up 40 per cent since 2023, the second fastest growth of the ten biggest markets.

Twenty of the 35 are announced and not open. That single word covers a building three months from handover and a press release about a piece of land, with no way to tell them apart.

Here is what that looks like in practice. Banyan Group is among the world’s top five brands by this measure, with 75 projects, 33 open and 42 announced. Forty-two sounds like a brand arriving everywhere at once. It is a count of announcements. It tells you nothing about whether any one of the 42 has a hole in the ground yet.

Open is no safer. A project counts as open once it is trading, and on a resort estate the hotel can be taking guests while the homes are still being finished, still being handed over, or still being sold by the developer. Open means the gate is open. It does not mean the specific home you are being shown is built.

So the question is the same either way: ask for a construction or handover fact, with a date, for that building — not for the resort around it.

The non-hotel share is 23 per cent on Phuket and 23 per cent in Bangkok, against 47 per cent in London and 51 per cent in New York. Worldwide it is near 30 per cent and heading for almost 40 per cent by 2028. A non-hotel brand might be a fashion house, a car maker or a design studio. What changes is who runs the building after you move in, and that is the question worth asking of any brand.

Built means the record shows the building exists. It does not mean we have walked it. Only one row in the whole register is marked as visited by us, Twinpalms Residences MontAzure. A document and a site visit are different things and we keep them apart.

All 10 of them: Amanpuri Residences, Angsana Oceanview Residences, COMO Point Yamu, Laguna Beach Residences Reef, Laguna Beach Residences Seashore, Skypark Celeste Laguna Phuket, Sri Panwa, The Standard Residences, Phuket Bang Tao, Trisara and Twinpalms Residences MontAzure. On all but one, we advise buyers from the buyer’s side.

We got this wrong once, in a draft of this article. Our register recorded how a project is sold, and had no field at all for what is built. The draft used a sales value as a stand-in and counted three estates a client could walk that month as unbuilt. Nothing went out. The register has a building field now, and it stays empty unless we hold dated evidence, because a guess there is worse than a gap.

The same check works on anyone’s number, not just ours. When a status sounds like a building fact, ask for the full list of values that field can hold. If the list reads under development, selling, completing, resale, it is a sales field, whatever one word in it sounds like.

Two last things. 10 rows are carried as under development, which is a sales state, not a building one. And our 43 and the 35 above are two different sets, counted under two different rules for two different purposes — so never subtract one from the other.

That column holds Layan Residences by Anantara, an established villa estate above Layan Beach that our register carries as selling. It holds Kiara Reserve Residences, which its developer’s website called “in its final phase” in August 2026 — a sales phrase we have not matched to a dated building fact of our own. And it holds PEYLAA Phuket, Autograph Collection Residences, announced in March 2026.

An estate a client can walk, a project in its final phase, and a launch from this spring all sit in one column — because the column records what we have established, not what is on the ground.

Thailand works in square metres, so everything above is per square metre. The published ranges are per square foot, and we converted them at 10.7639 square feet to the metre. The ranges are theirs. The conversion is ours.

The band covers about 80 per cent of high-end sales. The fifth left out is the top of each market. On Phuket that is essentially the beachfront villa market. So a published range describes the middle of a market, not its ceiling — and if anyone quotes the Phuket band at you against a beachfront villa, the wrong band is being used on you.

We publish a second Phuket figure from the other direction: branded apartments average THB 197,745 per square metre, from C9 Hotelworks, January 2026, on our register of branded residences in Phuket. One is an average of apartments only. The other is a range with the top cut off. Different groups, different methods, and neither contradicts the other. We will not multiply one by an exchange rate to line them up, because we cannot source a rate we would stand behind.