Real Estate Owners Are Using Exclusive Dining Events to Activate Unused Space and Attract New Tenants

Commercial real estate owners have always understood that empty spaces are lost opportunities. What they have been slower to recognize is that underutilized space, a lobby that sees foot traffic only during commuting hours, an amenity floor that sits quiet five nights a week, a rooftop with a view that nobody is paying to experience, is an asset waiting to be activated rather than simply a gap in the occupancy ledger. The events industry has long known this. The hospitality industry has known it as well. Now, a growing cohort of real estate owners is now figuring out that the intersection of those two industries and their own square footage represents an opportunity that goes well beyond what a traditional leasing strategy can capture.

One of the more interesting ideas gaining momentum in that space is the curated, one-off dinner hosted by a prominent chef in a venue that has no restaurant affiliation. The format is not new, but its application to commercial and multifamily real estate is, and the results are getting the attention of building owners and asset managers who have been looking for ways to give their spaces a cultural identity that a floor plan and a finishes package cannot provide on their own.

Resident, a chef-powered dining and event platform that recently celebrated its ten-year milestone, has been building the infrastructure for exactly this kind of activation for a decade. The company operates what it describes as an asset-light hospitality platform, connecting culinary talent with venues, audiences, and operational support across New York and Los Angeles rather than investing in permanent restaurant locations. Over that decade, Resident has produced more than 4,000 experiences ranging from intimate private dinners to large-scale brand activations. Its recent acquisition of BLACE, a curated portfolio of event venues, reflects a deliberate expansion of that model into a broader range of real estate contexts. Resident offers events ranging from ten-person dinners to thousand-person galas, conferences, and brand activations, all in spaces that are part of the portfolio of buildings it works with.

The chef relationship is central to why the format works. Rather than booking a catering company or renting a private dining room at an established restaurant, Resident builds experiences around culinary talent that has earned its reputation inside well-known kitchens but hasn’t yet had the opportunity to express a fully independent creative voice. “We partner with the up-and-coming tastemakers who are working at some of the best restaurants in the world and make it easy for them to create their own culinary narrative,” said Brian Momsen, founder and CEO of Resident. Chefs trained at some of the country’s hottest restaurants have hosted events through the platform, bringing institutional culinary credibility to spaces that have never had a kitchen identity of their own. The result is an experience that feels genuinely exclusive because it is: a menu that exists for one night only, in a space that doesn’t normally host dinners, prepared by a chef who is telling a story they haven’t been able to tell anywhere else.

That exclusivity is precisely what makes the format so well suited to corporate entertainment, which has always been a market defined by the search for experiences that feel different from what clients and partners have already seen. “A lot of the corporate clients are used to being entertained,” Momsen said. “Bringing them to another steakhouse doesn’t really have much gravity.” A private dinner in a building’s penthouse amenity space, hosted by a Michelin-trained chef presenting a menu that doesn’t exist anywhere else, is a fundamentally different proposition from a restaurant reservation, regardless of how good the restaurant is. The setting itself carries a message about the host’s taste and effort that a table at a well-known establishment cannot send in the same way.

The authenticity is what has driven repeat engagement for Resident over a decade of operating this format. Corporate clients who have used the platform keep coming back not because the food is exceptional, though it consistently is, but because the combination of a chef’s personal narrative, a one-of-a-kind menu, and a space that feels genuinely private creates an experience that is difficult to replicate through any other channel. The memory of a specific dinner in a specific space prepared by a specific chef who told you why they cooked what they cooked is more durable than the memory of a meal at a well-regarded restaurant.

For real estate owners, the financial case is becoming increasingly concrete. “We have spaces where the landlord is making around a million dollars a year on these events,” Momsen said. For a building with vacant or underutilized space that is generating no revenue, the contrast is stark. The events don’t require the landlord to build out a restaurant, hire hospitality staff, or operate a food and beverage program. They leverage existing amenity infrastructure, demonstration kitchens, private dining rooms, rooftop decks, and lobby spaces, and convert them into revenue-generating assets on a per-event basis. The operating model distributes the risk and the revenue in ways that work for both the building owner and the platform operator.

Revenue, however, is only part of what the events deliver. The audience that attends these dinners, the corporate decision-makers, the high-net-worth individuals, the tastemakers and influencers who follow emerging culinary talent, is an audience that has direct value to leasing teams trying to put names and faces to the tenants they want in their buildings. “We are bringing audiences that leasing teams can benefit from,” Momsen said. “We are happy when the buildings we are using get sold or leased. It means the owner got what they wanted.” A prospective tenant who has attended a dinner in a building’s amenity space has already formed a positive impression of the asset before a broker conversation ever happens. That experiential familiarity changes the leasing conversation in ways that renderings and spec sheets cannot replicate.

Multifamily operators have found their own version of the same dynamic. Buildings that have partnered with Resident give their residents access to events that are not available to the general public, providing a form of cultural amenity that sits alongside fitness centers and coworking spaces but operates in a different register entirely. “Tenants enjoy being able to get first access rights to these events, even if they have to buy tickets,” Momsen said. “It is an amenity just to be able to get access to exclusive events.” The ability to say that living in a building gives you early access to something genuinely scarce is a leasing and retention argument that competes with the physical amenity arms race on entirely different terrain.

The appetite for this kind of experience is not a trend that will peak and recede with any particular cultural moment. “It doesn’t matter how many bots we interact with,” Momsen said. “Real relationships are built in person. This means there will always be value to getting people into a room, and the best way to do that is to captivate them with something unique.” As AI continues to flatten the digital experience and make online interactions feel increasingly mediated and impersonal, the scarcity of genuinely memorable in-person events will only increase. Real estate owners who understand that their spaces are platforms for those experiences, not just square footage waiting to be leased, will find that the most valuable thing they can offer to corporate clients, prospective tenants, and existing residents is access to something that cannot be replicated, attended remotely, or experienced any other way.