Marriott is licensing its W brand to a 227-unit apartment tower opening next year in Cleveland, offering residents 24/7 concierge and hotel amenities. Unlike past residential projects, Marriott won't manage the building itself. If it works, the model could reshape how apartment buildings are branded across the country.
Mariat— yes, that Marriott, the huge hotel brand— is getting into the apartment rental business. Let's break it down. So Marriott struck a licensing deal with the developer of a mixed-use tower coming to downtown Cleveland. This will put the W Hotel's name on the 227-door apartment community. They're calling it the W Apartments Cleveland, and it's set to open next year. This is Marriott's first time putting a hotel brand on a long-term rental apartment community. Historically, when Marriott has done branded residential, It's been condos you buy, not units you lease. So this is brand new. Renters here get 24/7 concierge, a doorman, a bellman, and access to W-branded programming and hotel amenities. I think that's really interesting that they're getting the hotel amenities as part of this. That could be a big deal. An important detail here is that Marriott isn't actually managing this, just like they don't actually manage a lot of their hotels. They're licensing the brand to the building owner who's bringing in a third-party property manager to actually run it. To me, this is newsworthy because apartment buildings and communities typically get some type of throwaway brand like Flats on Vine or whatever, and nobody outside of a 5-mile radius has ever heard of it. To my knowledge, nobody's ever really cracked a national apartment brand, but Marriott has 100+ years of brand equity and a loyalty program with tens of millions of members sitting right there. If this Cleveland project works and if Marriott decides to scale it, it could totally upend how branding has historically worked for multifamily property Nationwide.
