In short: Bank of America found 87% of family offices have yet to pass to the next generation, while 59% to 60% expect a leadership transition within ten years. A large cohort is about to hand over, and the incoming group is not inheriting the previous group’s assumptions about property.
The Bank of America Private Bank 2025 Family Office Study surveyed 335 US decision-makers in May and June 2025 and published in November. Its central number is a queue rather than an event: 87% of offices have not yet transitioned, but 59% to 60% expect to within a decade and one in three within five years.
Almost nothing has happened yet, and almost everything is scheduled.
Head of Investor Relations at Onyx Reserve, a private investment firm based in South Florida, Tommy Shields has watched the composition of the people across the table change.
“The generation that made the money asks what the decision is, and the generation that inherited it asks how the decision gets made and who has to sign,” Shields said. “Founders trust a judgement because they have their own and they can test yours against it in an hour. Their children were not in the room when that judgement was formed, so they ask for the process instead, and they usually ask for it in writing. It is not a lack of confidence. It is the only form of verification available to someone who did not build the thing.”
The handover is concentrated, not gradual
A transition rate of one in three within five years does not spread evenly across a sector. It clusters, because the offices were founded in clusters, most of them after a liquidity event in a particular decade, and the founders are aging on a similar timetable.
Deloitte Private counted 8,030 single family offices worldwide in 2024, up from 6,130 in 2019, and projects 10,720 by 2030. A cohort that grew 31% in five years is a cohort whose median office is young, whose founder is still alive, and whose governance was written for one decision-maker rather than for a committee that has to outlive him.
What the next generation is given, and when
The UBS Global Family Office Report 2025, covering 317 single family offices with an average family net worth of $2.7bn, put some structure on what handover actually looks like. Among North American offices that have succession plans, 59% will place the next generation on the board, 41% involve them in strategic asset allocation and 39% in investment management.
Board seats come first and investment authority comes last, which is the order most families choose and not obviously the right one. A board seat teaches oversight. Sitting through an asset allocation argument teaches something else, and the two capabilities are not interchangeable when the founder is no longer in the room to break a tie.
The surveys do not agree on how many plans exist
Two credible surveys, fielded months apart, put the share of family offices with a succession plan 34 percentage points apart.
| Survey | Fieldwork | Sample | Question measured | Figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UBS Global Family Office Report 2026 | Jan to Mar 2026 | 307 family offices, $627.4bn total wealth | Has a defined succession plan | 35% |
| RBC / Campden Wealth North America 2025 | Apr to Aug 2025 | 141 North American offices, $285bn collective wealth | Has succession plans in place | 69%, up from 53% in 2024 |
| Bank of America Private Bank 2025 | May to Jun 2025 | 335 US decision-makers | Has yet to pass to the next generation | 87% |
The temptation is to pick the number that suits the argument being made. The honest reading is that the two are measuring different things under similar words. UBS asks about a defined plan, which implies documentation. Campden asks whether plans are in place, which a respondent can answer yes to on the strength of an understanding that has never been written down. Sample geography does more work still: UBS is global, Campden is North American only, and the Campden panel skews to offices large enough to have professionalised early.
Neither survey publishes enough underlying detail to settle it from outside. What both agree on is direction. Campden’s own series moved from 53% to 69% in a single year, which is a faster change than the underlying behaviour plausibly allows and suggests some of the movement is families reclassifying what they already had.
Why property is where the difference shows
Real estate is the asset class where a generational difference in temperament becomes a difference in portfolio. UBS put real estate at 18% of North American family office portfolios in 2025, inside a 54% allocation to alternatives, with private equity at 27% and private debt and hedge funds at 3% each.
An 18% allocation held for twenty years is a decision made once. The incoming generation has been raised in a period when that assumption was tested more than once, and it shows in adjacent behaviour: Goldman Sachs found cryptocurrency ownership among family offices at 33% in 2025, up from 26% in 2023, and 72% now investing in secondaries against 60% previously. Secondaries in particular are a liquidity instrument. Buying them is a statement about how long a family is willing to be locked up, made by people who have watched a lock-up outlast a market view.
Branded product sits at the intersection of both instincts. Savills Research put the price premium on branded residences in the Americas at 36%, above the 33% global average, and forecasts 127% pipeline growth in Miami, in research published in May 2026 with data as at January 2026. A premium of that size is paid for management and for resale legibility rather than for square footage, which is a different purchase from the one the founding generation made.
What changes when the principal steps back
The most useful finding in the Bank of America study is about engagement rather than age. Among family offices with less-engaged principals, 73% expect the next generation to redefine the office’s mission, against 37% of offices where the principal remains highly involved.
The gap is 36 points, and it is not explained by the next generation’s views, which do not change according to how often a parent comes into the office. It is explained by whether there is room to act on them. A mission gets redefined when the person who wrote it stops attending, and the survey is measuring the vacancy rather than the ambition.
Which makes preparation the variable. UBS 2026 found just 27% of family offices running structured next-generation education programmes, alongside the 35% with a defined succession plan. Roughly seven in ten offices are heading into a handover they expect within a decade without a formal way of teaching the people who will run it.
The regional test case
South Florida offers an unusually clean view of the question, because the property market there is already split along the same lines. Miami-Dade condominiums sat at 12 months of supply in July 2026 against 4.8 months for single-family homes, taking 125 days to sale, according to MIAMI REALTORS.
An office with a twenty-year holding assumption reads that as noise. An office being handed to someone who now sits on the investment committee, and who has been asked to justify allocations in writing, reads it as a question about which segment the family’s exposure actually sits in.
What is still unknown
Nobody can yet say whether the incoming generation will hold real estate at 18% or somewhere else, because the transitions the surveys anticipate have mostly not occurred. The 87% figure is the whole difficulty. The behaviour being forecast belongs to people who have not yet had authority, and their stated intentions have been collected by asking them what they would do rather than by watching what they did.
The first sizeable wave of those handovers falls inside the next five years, on the survey’s own timetable. Whether the reallocation follows the rhetoric is a question the data will answer without anyone’s help, and not before then.