Tastemaker’s Note:
Real estate is where the gym economy is hiding in plain sight. Fitness properties have become a serious net-lease investment class with corporate-backed gyms securing 15–20 year leases with cap rates averaging 6–7%. The in-demand buildings of 2026 are defined by their wellness centers, making fitness a direct rent driver, not just an amenity. Directly, that's owning the real estate under the gym. Indirectly, it's VNQ — quietly compounding off the same consumer shift your membership is funding.

Standing 1,100 feet in the sky, on the 100th floor deck of The Edge in Hudson Yards, fills you with so much emotion.

First, you realize both how small and big you are, simultaneously.
You’re viewing the horizon, our beautiful city filled with skyscrapers and the sunset beaming right at you. Seeing how expansive and vast our world is from afar……it’s unimaginable that human expertise has grown to such depth.

When we invest in ourselves, it shows.
And when we invest in others who equally invest in themselves, everything multiplies.

Relationships.
Learning.
Trust.
Legacy.

Equinox is an example of that type of investment, the kind that leaves a legacy.

I saw and felt it play out literally from attending a class right there on the deck, a hundred floors up and the entire skyline as the backdrop instead of a mirror.

A group of people breathing hard, arms shaking, pushing through the last few reps, with the entire world just... behind them. Like it was nothing.

Nobody stopped to stare at the view. They were too busy showing up for themselves, in a moment that had nothing polished or camera-ready about it.

You don't forget a scene like that.

It's a rather strange thing to witness: the most vulnerable, unglamorous parts of showing up for yourself with the person next to you who caught your eye when it was challenging, all staged against the most spectacular view New York has to offer.

Equinox sold the discipline, the identity, the people who show up for each other — directly inside the thing everyone comes to Hudson Yards to see.

Instead, Equinox competes with hotels, private clubs, healthcare, hospitality, fashion, wellness, luxury residential, networking and travel.

That’s a much bigger market and Equinox has built a concept that uniquely touches each of those areas in the most sophisticated of ways.

Walk into the Equinox Club for a workout and you're stepping into the same building as Equinox Hotel New York, the brand's first hotel (opened in 2019) built on the idea that a gym membership and a hospitality stay could be the same emotional product.

That thesis has since scaled: Equinox now runs 115 clubs with roughly 40 more in development across markets like Nashville, Toronto, Charlotte, and South Florida, and its hotel arm is developing a global network of high-performance, customer-centric hotels, with 33 properties planned worldwide over the next decade.

A second hotel is opening on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, and a resort in Anguilla is next, complete with branded residences, a marina, and on-site retail — the blended concept made literal, in concrete and steel.

And then, there's Optimize by Equinox, the brand's $40,000-a-year longevity membership, which has reportedly built a waitlist of more than 1,000 people even at that price point….

The category Equinox sits in is one of the fastest-growing pools of capital in the world. The Global Wellness Institute pegs the wellness economy at roughly $6.8 trillion in 2024, on track toward $10 trillion by 2030, and wellness real estate specifically has doubled from $225 billion in 2019 to $548 billion in 2024, with a $1.1 trillion market projected by 2029.

Equinox's own real estate is already being priced into that story: a portion of 35 Hudson Yards, including Equinox Hotel New York, changed hands in a reported $541 million deal late last year as a real estate transaction, not a brand transaction, which is proof in its own right that the address itself now carries investable value.

Family offices, meanwhile, have been steadily rotating toward exactly this kind of asset → Roughly 45% of family office portfolios now sit in alternatives, split across private equity, real estate, and venture, and the sectors pulling the most fresh capital in 2026 read like a blueprint for the blended-lifestyle thesis: longevity and health-technology platforms, and a widening overlap between real estate and sports and entertainment, where a marquee venue becomes the anchor for housing, retail, and hospitality built around it.

Swap "stadium" for "flagship club" and you have the Equinox playbook.

It's not hard to see why this resonates with the investors and family offices I work with. They're done with buying treadmills. Today, they're buying into relationships, learning, trust, and legacy — the same four things that stopped me on the 100th floor deck at The Edge, a few months ago.

A gym membership is a monthly fee.
A blended lifestyle asset is a claim on how people want to live and that claim compounds in the longterm.

That happens to be the investment thesis. And that's my view from 1,100 feet.

(Read The Future of the $300B Gym Market from Five-Course Tasting 👇)

Every remarkable offering has two layers: what people see and what they truly value.

Like the caviar hidden beneath the surface, the real advantage is rarely the product. Instead it's the ecosystem built around meaning, transformation and relationship capital inside.

P.S. Like my style (and taste)? Work with me.