Last week, Hilton announced it will expand in the residential hospitality segment, offering furnished apartment accommodations through a new brand, Apartment Collection.
The flag will officially launch later this year through a partnership with apartment-style accommodations provider Placemakr. The tie-up follows Hilton’s long interest in the apart-hotel segment, which holds significant opportunity, Chris Silcock, president of global brands and commercial services at Hilton, said in a statement.
Both Hilton and Placemakr share a clear vision to institutionalize home-style stays, Placemakr CEO Jason Fudin told Hotel Dive, following last week’s announcement. In a one-on-one interview, Fudin also shared his outlook on what he anticipates will be a decade of rapid growth for apartment-style accommodations and how the product could reshape the hospitality industry.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HOTEL DIVE: How did this partnership come to be, and why was now an opportune time to partner with a major hotel company?
JASON FUDIN: It’s a very simple answer. We have a shared vision with Hilton. It became clear that Hilton’s view of what should happen in the home-style accommodation space matched our view, and so we decided to team up. It’s rare in business, actually, to have two adjacent companies that have the same long-term goals, but we did, and so it's a natural plan to come together on those.
Our goal is to make home-style stays, or apartment-style stays, institutionalized and to provide a high-quality consistent product and experience for both customers and real estate owners. We aim for this to become an institutional asset class, which we call flex living.
As part of that, on a go-forward basis, all of these Hilton-Placemakr properties will have 24-hour on-site staff, and they will operate under a distinct set of standards. So we’re leaning into some of the infrastructure that Hilton has on institutional standards, and they’re leaning into the experience we have, being at the front of the pack for tech-enabled operations in the apartment-hotel space.
How is demand for apartment-style accommodations evolving, both from consumers and owners?
On the consumer side, in addition to amenities like in-unit kitchens or laundry, there’s a ton of demand for multibedroom accommodations. People are traveling in groups, or they’re with large families, and to accommodate them, the hotel equivalent today is adjoining rooms, which are definitely not the same experience as having a two- or three-bedroom apartment. There’s a really big hole there.
Then there’s this increased need for corporate housing, cases like a three-month internship or a doctor on a six-week residency. Those folks are left in no-man’s-land — stuck going into an apartment building in an awkward sublet or something because this kind of institutional partnership hasn’t existed at scale.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of owners are either apartment owners or hotel owners. There’s not a lot of crossover, but we look to be the bridge. Our long-term vision is that there’s more overlap between the asset classes. You can expect Placemakr to work with more hotel owners that want to have apartment-hotel products, and you can expect more apartment owners to bleed into the hospitality space in blended buildings as well.
The apartment-style accommodations sector is going to be the fastest-growing category for the next decade. Home-style stays have already been the fastest-growing segment, both domestically and internationally, for the last number of years. Now, this partnership represents the beginning of the category’s institutionalization.
Are there any barriers to the category’s growth?
The biggest barrier is just the physicality of the product — that the supply may not exist yet. It takes time to build or convert buildings and boost that store of inventory, but that’s the nature of real estate.
More real estate dollars will pour into the space as it becomes institutionalized. The more large public companies like Hilton that get into space, the more real estate capital will come into the space. And the more real estate capital that comes into space, the more inventory you’ll see.
What does Placemakr’s pipeline look like for 2026, and how will this partnership bolster growth?
We do have growth plans for this year, none of which we’re ready to share yet, relating to specific properties. But at a high level, our growth should accelerate. We should have more inventory and more projects in more cities, which would benefit both us and Hilton.
