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Week of October 13, 2026

The Brief

The Cliffs at Glassy, a world you do not have to leave.

What a Haven Costs

Every year Christie's International Real Estate asks its affiliate network, more than 6,500 advisors in 50 countries, where the luxury market is headed. Those answers feed the Prime Sentiment Index and shape the report's four big trends. The first trend this year is Havens: privacy, self-sufficiency, homes that work as their own small world. Presenting the report on The Academy Live in April, the firm's president, Gavin Swartzman, said the idea behind all four was a single word, belonging.

The 2026 Prime Sentiment Index. Tap for the full Market Pulse.

One caveat before anything else. He also said the survey was completed before the conflict in the Middle East began, so it measured a mood that predates the news. His view was that the conflict makes the haven instinct stronger, not weaker. Hold that as an informed opinion, not a data point.

Read the source: Christie's has the full Havens chapter and The 2026 Market Pulse open on its site, no form required.

Christie's affiliates point stability buyers to Uruguay, Switzerland and New Zealand. If you want to see a haven built on purpose without a passport, look at The Cliffs. Seven gated communities across the Upstate and western North Carolina, a club in each, and one membership that opens all seven. They were designed as a world you do not have to leave. That is the appeal, and it is also the invoice.

Here is the invoice, as printed. For 2026, a Full Golf membership costs $100,000 to join, plus a $3,000 improvement fee, then $1,710 a month. The Active membership, everything but the golf, is half that at the door and $850 a month, with a $1,200 annual food and beverage minimum for residents that Full Golf does not carry. Before the house, a Full Golf buyer writes $103,000 at signing and carries $20,520 a year in dues. None of that is a complaint. Self-sufficiency costs money to maintain. That is rather the point.

The Havens chapter has a line worth stealing. Aaron Kirman, who runs Christie's in Southern California, says "self-sufficiency has become synonymous with luxury," and that generators, water purification and serious security, once filed under insurance, are now simply the standard. Agreed. But every haven still carries one insurance policy you cannot install in the basement. It is the line that is not on the club's schedule.

In its September Mortgage Monitor, ICE reported that the average single-family mortgage holder now pays a record $209 a month for property insurance, up 8.7 percent in a year. Greenville, South Carolina sat at the top of ICE's list of the largest annual increases, at 15.8 percent. Honolulu was next, at 14.7.

Two caveats, because they matter. That figure is a metro average across mortgaged homes, most of which are not on a mountain behind a gate, so it tells you the direction of the wind, not your premium. And a steep percentage on a modest base is a smaller dollar number than it sounds. Still, direction is exactly what a haven buyer should watch, because a haven is a long hold, and carrying costs compound over a long hold.

The same report carried the most useful sentence I have read about insurance this year. Homeowners who switched carriers over the past year cut their payments by 6.6 percent on average, the largest savings ICE has recorded since it began tracking in 2013. Those who stayed with their existing carrier saw premiums rise 10.4 percent. That is a seventeen-point spread for a few phone calls.

So the practical advice is dull and valuable. Shop the policy at every renewal, especially if you own on a mountainside, on water, or on acreage where replacement cost is hard to pin down. Ask an independent agent to quote several carriers. Check your limits against what it would cost to rebuild today, not what you paid. There is no product here and nobody to call on our end. Just the phone call most owners skip.

There is a larger frame, too. Money is not cheap right now. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed to 5.33 percent on October 1, its highest level since 2002. The families with the most to protect are watching the same thing. Citi's 2026 survey of 351 family offices found that 63 percent named inflation their top concern, and that 37 percent of North American family offices plan to increase their real estate allocations, well above any other region. Those two numbers sit together more comfortably than they look. When prices keep rising, a hard asset you can actually live in starts to look like protection.

The Christie's numbers point the same way. Buyer demand in the index cooled from +37.7 to +29.3, while price expectations edged up to +14.6. Swartzman called it a market that is recalibrating, and affiliates describe fewer urgency purchases and more buyers choosing on fit and long-term confidence. Translation for anyone buying behind a gate in 2027: the buyers who are left are doing the math. Do yours first.

That is the honest shape of a haven. It shelters you from a great deal, but not from its own upkeep. Put the carrying costs in the model on day one, shop them every year after, and it does what it promised.

The Branded Haven

A Haven With Room Service

The Havens chapter has a second idea inside it, and the hotel companies wrote it. Christie's says branded residences now reach well past hotels, into fashion houses, automakers and wellness brands, with Dubai leading and momentum building across the Americas. Its Dubai managing partner, Jackie Johns, described buyers treating them as lifestyle ecosystems: a brand's service, privacy and staying power wrapped around a home. The only American city the report names among the emerging markets for these projects is Austin. Charleston did not make the list. It is about to get a Four Seasons anyway.

The category is not small anymore. Savills counted 764 branded residential schemes worldwide at the end of 2024 and expected 910 by the end of 2025, growth of 19 percent in a year. Its research puts the average premium over comparable unbranded homes at about a third, and closer to 39 percent in resort locations. That premium is the whole business model, so it is worth knowing what it buys. Three projects in our markets, at three very different stages.

Rendering of Charleston Four Seasons

Charleston Four Seasons, 155 Meeting Street.
Thirty-six residences above a 139-room hotel, priced from $5 million, with Strategic Property Partners developing and Cascade Investment as its capital partner. The plans run from two bedrooms at about 2,000 square feet to five bedrooms at about 3,700. If the $5 million entry buys the smallest plan, that is roughly $2,500 a square foot, against about $943 for homes in downtown Charleston this summer by Redfin's count. Hoar Construction is the new general contractor, groundbreaking is expected by the end of the year, and the opening has moved to 2030, two years past the first target. Our Field Note has the detail.

Bluffton Montage Residences, Palmetto Bluff.
The Lowcountry already has the model running. Montage Residences were first offered at Palmetto Bluff in 2015, and Palmetto Bluff Builders is now finishing the enclave with a final eight homes, with owner access to the resort's programs and services. Read the fine print on the community's own site, though. The Montage name is used under a license that can be terminated or expire without renewal, and if it does, the homes stop being Montage branded. That is not a knock on Montage. It is the truth about every branded residence: the brand is a contract, and contracts have terms.

Lowcountry islands Six Senses, still a rendering.
Announced in 2024 for a 2026 opening across Hilton Head, Daufuskie and Bay Point, with branded residences planned on Daufuskie. It is October 2026, there is no opening date, and the old Melrose Resort on Daufuskie Island remains mostly untouched. Our Field Note explains why the date matters less than the zoning.

Here is how it connects to the rest of this issue. A branded residence is a haven sold as a subscription. The gate becomes a doorman, the HOA becomes a service charge with a hotel's payroll inside it, and the premium you pay at signing is a bet that the service and the name outlast your hold. Three questions before you pay a third more for the name on the door:

• What does the monthly service charge cover, and who decides when it goes up?

• Is the brand a license? Ask for the term, and what happens to the homes if it ends.

• What is the delivery date as a range, not a promise? Charleston's moved two years. The islands' has not arrived.

The brand is the easy part to buy. The contract underneath it is the part you live with.

The Pulse

What is actually happening in the places we cover. A standing section here every Tuesday.

No. 01 Greenville · County Square starts going up, and the condos are the line to watch.
The old county government campus on the south edge of downtown is being rebuilt as a mixed-use district of about 40 acres, a project Atlanta's RocaPoint Partners carries at more than $1 billion. The first phase is ten buildings and three parking decks over roughly three years. Whole Foods, Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn and L.L. Bean are on the tenant list, and the builder of the first townhomes had pre-sold 16 of 21 by late August. Still unnamed: a 155-room hotel and a condominium project, both under letters of intent. Until the condos are named and priced, nobody can tell you what a home at County Square costs. Our Field Note reads the tenant list.

No. 02 Bluffton · Old Town writes its next ten years.
The town has opened its 2027 Old Town Master Plan, a decade-long blueprint for zoning, preservation and development around the May River. The first public meeting was held October 6, and a final plan is due by the middle of 2027. Officials point to the 2006 framework before it, which they credit with drawing more than $70 million in private investment off about $6 million in public money. How a town writes its rules is how it decides what it will become. Our Field Note runs the numbers on the last plan.

Field Notes

Between the letters, one number at a time. Every figure traced to a primary source, or labeled as somebody's opinion, including ours.

T H I S  W E E K ' S  R E A D

Kiawah Island: a haven is partly a gate. Mostly it is a shortage.

On September 17, a house on the 14th green of Turtle Point, with the beach right beside it, closed at $16.15 million, according to county records reported by The Post and Courier. The more useful number is how little else was available: at the end of the first quarter, Kiawah Island Real Estate counted 99 listings across the island's 4,828 properties, 2.1 percent of everything there, and by September 1 the firm's own count was 37 houses. Behind that gate, price is set less by the market than by how rarely anything comes to it.

Read the Field Note

Also new: your taxable gain is not your sale price, and what the Carolinas take from it.

Destination Spotlight

Lake Keowee, South Carolina

Saturday's Weekend Escape went to Lake Keowee, the haven idea with a shoreline: the Upstate's cleanest big lake, and the water The Cliffs built three of its seven communities around. A gate, a club, a dock, and a drive to Greenville short enough that you are not actually leaving anything behind.

It is also where this issue's advice gets practical. Lakefront is exactly where replacement cost is hard to pin down, so it is exactly where shopping the policy pays.

Before you tour, the Lake Keowee Locals guide takes the four gated communities on the water cove by cove, with a Southern Escapes Score for each and a straight answer on where Cliffs dues stack on top of the HOA. And if it is a lot on the water you are weighing, the shoreline rules are their own diligence. Here is which ones are actually in effect.

Off-Market Signal

Cliffs at Glassy

Last week, this home in the Cliffs at Glassy went under contract before it hit the market. Some of the best houses in our network never reach a listing site. When a seller wants a quiet sale and a buyer on our list has told us exactly what they are waiting for, we make the call before anyone makes the brochure. It is not a property alert and it is not another newsletter. If that is useful to you, one tap puts you on it, your email is already filled in: sellingwithdhg.com/quiet

The Calendar

• Through October 31 · The Preservation Society of Charleston's Fall Tours of Homes, History and Architecture run all month: private houses and gardens open for an afternoon, $100 a tour for non-members, walking tours from $40.

• Sundays, through November 8 · Aiken fall polo, Sunday afternoons on Whitney Field.

• Show weekends this fall · Saturday Night Lights returns to Tryon International, 5 to 9 PM, admission complimentary. Grand prix jumping under the lights.

• October 20 · The Optionality Premium in the Ledger: the second home, and who can still afford one near seven percent.

• October 21 to November 1 · The National Horse Show is scheduled at Tryon International, its first year in the foothills.

• October 30 to November 1 · The Hilton Head Island Concours d'Elegance and Motoring Festival, with the Concours itself on Sunday, November 1, on the fairways at Port Royal Golf Club.

• November 3 · SE Versus in the Ledger: the Carolinas against Florida, category by category, no ties.

The Insider

The Weekend Escape lands Saturday at 8 AM. Next Tuesday, the Ledger takes up the second primary home: the house you live in for part of the year, and who can still afford one near seven percent. And on November 3, SE Versus puts the Carolinas and Florida side by side, category by category, no ties.

If a number in this issue changed your model, reply and tell me which one. I read every reply.

Damian Hall
DAMIAN HALL GROUP / SOUTHERN ESCAPES

The intelligence layer between where you are and where you belong.

Southern Escapes is the market intelligence platform of Damian Hall Group, the principal-led luxury team operating under Blackstream | Christie's International Real Estate. This newsletter is for informational purposes. Nothing here constitutes tax, financial, or legal advice. Run your scenario with your advisor before you act on it.

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