The Borderless Decade Is Already Here — And Lake Lanier Is In It

By Ashley Smith, CLHMS, Luxury & Lake Lanier Real Estate Expert

A new intelligence report landed on my desk this month from REALM Global — the invitation-only network of ~600 luxury advisors across 40+ U.S. states and 21 countries that I'm a member of. It's titled The Borderless Decade, written by REALM's founder Julie Faupel, and it's the clearest read I've seen on where the top of the market is actually heading between now and 2028.

You can read the full report here in a page-flip viewer — I've made it available on my site along with a downloadable PDF. Below is my read on what stood out and what it means if you own or are thinking about owning on Lake Lanier or in Metro Atlanta.

The Short Version

The luxury buyer of 2030 is not the luxury buyer of 2010. That's the entire thesis. And the report is not soft on it: "The advisors operating as if they are will not last the decade."

The data behind that claim:

• The global UHNW population reached 713,626 individuals in 2026, up 162,000 over five years — roughly eighty-nine new entrants every day. It'll cross 734,000 by 2030, controlling ~$84 trillion in net worth.

• One in every five UHNW individuals is now foreign-born. An estimated 142,000 millionaires will relocate internationally in 2025 — the largest annual figure ever recorded.

• Women are projected to control 40–45% of global private wealth by 2030 — approximately $105 trillion by 2045. The number of female billionaires has more than doubled in the last decade.

• Gen X and Millennials will inherit roughly $4.6 trillion in global real estate over the next ten years. The United States captures 52% of that transfer.

Read those four bullets together and you can feel the ground shifting. Wealth is moving faster, across more borders, into different hands, and toward different kinds of property than it did even five years ago.

What "Borderless" Actually Means in Practice

The report focuses mostly on international flows — Americans buying in the U.K. after the non-dom recalibration, capital moving into New Zealand under the reformed Overseas Investment Act, wellness-anchored branded residences in the Mexican Caribbean. That's the global picture.

But here's what I want you to notice: the same forces are playing out domestically, and Metro Atlanta and Lake Lanier are directly in the path.

The buyer who used to be rooted in a single ZIP code isn't rooted anymore. My last twelve months have included buyers relocating from California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Florida. Some are moving here full-time. Others are buying a Lake Lanier home as a second residence, an early-retirement landing pad, or a multi-generational gathering property. The domestic version of "borderless" is a family whose primary residence, business address, adult children, and long-term-care planning all sit in different states — and who need a home that ties those geographies together.

Georgia — and Lake Lanier specifically — is one of the places that answers to that need. Tax structure, cost of living relative to the coasts, direct flights out of Hartsfield-Jackson to almost anywhere on earth, and a waterfront lifestyle within an hour of downtown Atlanta. That combination is now showing up in my inquiry mix, and REALM's data confirms it isn't an anomaly.

The Face of the Buyer Is Changing Too

The other shift I'd underline from the report is who the wealth is landing with.

Women are becoming the deciding voice on more transactions than the industry is set up to serve. That maps to what I see on Lake Lanier — a growing share of the initial calls, the property walks, and the final decisions are coming from women. Sometimes she's the sole principal. More often she's the strategic decision-maker in a couple where the property purchase is being evaluated as part of a broader wealth picture: legacy planning, insurance against volatility elsewhere, a family retreat that anchors adult children in one place.

Next-generation buyers — Gen X and Millennials — are inheriting real estate portfolios and reshaping them. The report projects that Millennials and Gen Z will grow from ~8% of UHNW individuals today to ~35% by 2040. When a Boomer parent hands off a lake house, the next generation is often not going to keep it as-is. They're evaluating whether it still fits — location, dock access, walkability to boating, entertaining capacity, remote-work quality — against their own priorities. Some sell. Some renovate. Many upgrade to a different lake home entirely. That inheritance-driven turnover is starting to show up on Lanier and it's going to accelerate.

Multicultural and foreign-born wealth creators are the third category. The report notes that Knight Frank tracks UHNW growth of 63% in India (2021–2026), 82% in Indonesia, 63% in Saudi Arabia and Poland each. The wealth being created in Mumbai, Riyadh, Jakarta, and Ho Chi Minh City is not staying put. Some of it lands here. Not tomorrow, but progressively over the next decade.

Why Lake Lanier Has What This Buyer Actually Wants

The report's most useful reframing, in my view, is on what luxury buyers are actually buying now. It's not square footage and signature finishes. It's what Faupel calls "the forty-year operating system the residents are buying into." Clinical infrastructure. Lifestyle ecosystems. Multi-decade quality of life a property can support.

Lake Lanier maps to that language directly. Not in the specific way a Costa Mujeres branded residence does — we don't have a St. Regis clinic on the shoreline — but in the underlying logic:

• A dock, a boat, and deep-water access is a wellness-anchored lifestyle. Water skiing, fishing, sunset boat rides, kids growing up on the lake — those are decade-scale amenities, not weekend ones.

• The lake is a natural gathering point for multi-generational families. Grandparents at the main house, adult kids and grandkids visiting for holidays and summer weekends, the property becoming the anchor for a family that lives elsewhere the rest of the time. That's the exact use case the report keeps circling back to.

• Structural scarcity is real here. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permits dock access on Lake Lanier and issues new permits only in extremely limited circumstances. Every waterfront home you can buy right now has a dock permit that was granted years ago and cannot be re-created. The report spends a full page on New Zealand's trophy properties (approximately 7,000 nationwide, only ~350 changing hands per year). Lake Lanier's private-dock inventory is subject to the same kind of hard supply ceiling, just less discussed.

That last point is why I keep telling clients that a Lake Lanier waterfront purchase is fundamentally different from buying a subdivision home. You are buying access that cannot be manufactured.

What This Means If You Are Thinking About Selling

If you're on the fence about listing your Lake Lanier waterfront in the next twelve to eighteen months, the report gives me two things to hand you.

First, your buyer pool is larger and more geographically distributed than it was three years ago. A property that used to be marketed primarily to Atlanta buyers is now marketable to relocating capital from higher-tax states, to next-generation inheritors evaluating whether their parents' portfolio still fits, and — through my REALM membership — to a vetted network of ~600 luxury advisors representing high-net-worth buyers globally. That doesn't guarantee a better price, but it materially changes the odds.

Second, marketing that assumes the buyer is local no longer works at this end of the market. Institutional-grade photography, video, and staging matter more than they used to, because the qualified buyer often makes the first substantive evaluation without physically visiting the property. That's not new advice for luxury real estate. It is more true now than it was.

What This Means If You Are Thinking About Buying

If you're one of the relocating buyers the report is describing — you're evaluating Lake Lanier from Southern California, from the Northeast, from Florida, from another country — you already know the domestic-borderless pattern I'm describing. You are it.

The specific thing I'd say to you: the buyer who has the best outcome on Lake Lanier is the one who understands the dock-permit reality before they fall in love with a specific house. The permit system is what makes a great waterfront property great. It also makes a mediocre one very hard to fix later. Ask about the permit before you ask about the kitchen. If your buyer's agent doesn't lead with that, you have the wrong agent.

The Piece That Doesn't Depreciate

The line from the report I keep coming back to is Faupel's closing observation: "Trust is the asset that does not depreciate when the data commoditizes the rest."

The map has been redrawn. The buyer pool has changed. Zillow, Redfin, and every AI tool coming next will keep flattening the informational advantage that used to belong to real estate agents. What doesn't get commoditized is the relationship that holds a family across decades — the advisor who knows which off-market home is about to surface, who catches the dock-permit issue before the offer, who is still your first call when your kids inherit the property fifteen years from now.

That's the whole reason REALM exists, and it's the whole reason I built DreamSmith Realty the way I did.

If you want to read the full report, flip through it here or download the PDF from the same page. If any of this maps to a decision you're thinking through on Lake Lanier, reach out directly — or check the box on the download form asking to talk strategy, and I'll follow up personally.

The decade is borderless. Lake Lanier is one of the addresses where that capital is actually landing.

Ashley Smith is a Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist, a REALM Global member, and the founder of DreamSmith Realty. Reach her at ashley@dreamsmithrealty.com or (770) 790-3527.

Source: REALM Intelligence, "The Borderless Decade" — Global Intelligence Report, May 2026, by Julie Faupel, Founder & CEO, REALM Global. Underlying data drawn from Knight Frank's 2026 Wealth Report, the Altrata Global Citizens study (May 2026), Coldwell Banker Global Luxury 2026 Trend Report, and research from McKinsey, Julius Baer, Boodle Hatfield LLP, and The Luxury Collective.