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Ten buildings make use of intelligent technologies to enhance the tenant experience, save energy and other resources, and gather data to help with building operations.

In 2018, Los Angeles-based real estate firm LOWE, sold its hotel operating subsidiary to Hyatt Hotels for $480 million. That kind of exit was not part of some original projection, said Robert “Bob” S. Lowe Sr., the company’s founder and a ULI Foundation Governor, speaking at a ULI event in South Carolinain mid-November.

The talk about futuristic transportation has been exciting, but reality may be more expensive—and farther off—than imagined.

Panelists at a recent ULI Charlotte event acknowledged that the city has much to be thankful for as it heads into 2020, but they also noted the need to protect the region’s quality of life and relative affordability, which have been key to attracting economic development and outside investment.

Sam Chandan, associate dean of New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate and host of the Real Estate Hour on SiriusXM Radio presented his economic forecast for 2020 at a ULI New York event in November.

Greening the workplace beyond the existing building code requirements requires both tenants and owners to prioritize investing in and tracking sustainability. Two panels of experts, one composed of tenant representatives and the other of property owner representatives, discussed their challenges and solutions at “Beyond Code for a Greener Bay Area: Owner and Tenant Solutions for Sustainable Buildouts,” an event organized by ULI San Francisco and ULI’s Tenant Energy Optimization Program.

From recommending how communities in Puerto Rico can better prepare for extreme weather events to how Atlanta can “stitch” a divided downtown back together with new streets, buildings, and parks, ULI members have provided creative solutions to the most complex land use challenges facing communities for more than 70 years through the Institute’s Advisory Services program.

Commercial structures could be a formidable barrier to 5G wireless.

Principles for making cities smart—for the people in them.

The ULI/Allen Matkins Capital Markets Roundtable, now in its fifth year, brings together investors, developers, lenders, managers, and intermediaries at the ULI Fall Meeting to share insights and perspectives on the current and future outlook for real estate capital markets. Panelists discussed what is working for their firms.

After several years of steady growth, Asia Pacific real estate continues to produce strong returns, but caution is increasingly embedded into investor strategies, according to Emerging Trends in Real Estate ^® Asia Pacific 2020, an annual real estate forecast jointly published by ULI and PwC. Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, and Melbourne are ranked as four of the top five markets for investment prospects, reflecting investor preference for regional markets that are large, liquid, and defensive.

Embodied carbon refers to the emissions associated with manufacturing, transportation, and construction of building materials, as well as building disposal. As buildings become more efficient and emit less carbon during their operational lifetime, embodied carbon will become the majority share of building-related carbon emissions.

A nervous system capable of collecting data and a brain that is able to make use of it are vital to a system that meets the needs of stakeholders—and society.

The Dodge Momentum Index, a monthly measure of the initial report for U.S. nonresidential building projects in planning, rose 6.9 percent month over month in October. The increase was due to a recovery in institutional planning projects, which had stepped back over the previous few months. Institutional planning moved 22.8 percent higher in the month while commercial planning lost 0.5 percent.

In the Waterfront Toronto RFP for Quayside, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs saw a key opportunity for a demonstration project unbound by the conventions of traditional urban planning or real estate economics. This was something new: a chance to innovate at the urban scale, to develop, deploy, and measure the success of a web of new technologies in an actual neighborhood.

In Toronto, Sidewalk Labs has sketched out an ambitious vision for a high-tech urban environment designed with human needs rather than technology in mind. Whether it will come to fruition remains unclear.

Despite the political uncertainty across Europe and around the world, European real estate remains a desirable asset for investors globally. That is the bottom line of the new Emerging Trends in Real Estate® Europe 2020report released by the Urban Land Institute with PwC in Brussels. The coming 2024 Olympic Games were cited as a big draw for Paris, but the Grand Paris project was also mentioned many times by panelists.

The ULI Europe Leadership Retreat, which took place in Lisbon at the end of September, was a wonderful opportunity to catch up with fellow professionals from the real estate industry thanks to the connections made through the ULI.

The cover package for the 2019 Tech special issue is titled “Technology: Searching for practical solutions.” Other topics include “Smart Cities: Sidewalk’s Toronto,” “Transportation: From Scooters to Skyports,” and “Big Data: Putting Data to Work.”

By the end of 2019, the first families will move into new, million-dollar townhouses at Edge-on-Hudson, a $1 billion development that will eventually bring more than a thousand new residences to Sleepy Hollow, New York.

The tech industry has claimed an increasingly larger share of major U.S. office-leasing activity as real estate and economic indicators point to continued momentum for the sector over the next two years, according to CBRE’s annual Tech-30 report. CBRE’s analysis found that tech companies accounted for 21 percent of major office-leasing activity in the first half of this year, up from 11 percent when CBRE began tracking the figures in 2011.

Hudson Yards, Schuylkill Yards, and Port Covington are just three examples of real estate development driven by expanding and diversifying economies in the country’s Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. Economic sectors such as technology, education and medicine, financial services, and media are thriving and gobbling up space in major markets.

ULI Advisory Services panelists spent a week in October visiting various sites in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to evaluate buildings as well as the infrastructure, especially connected to the area’s water management. The panel made several recommendations for how the city of Fort Lauderdale, the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), and local developers can create a greener, more connected, less congested, and more resilient downtown.

Hotels and office buildings are taking on many of each other’s characteristics in terms of design and use. This confluence has several drivers, among them the evolution of technology, shifts in guest and tenant expectations, and the increasing mobility of the American workforce.

Ten residences for college students shape social interaction in site-specific environments.

Climate change and its relationship to water management are having a profound impact on cities, compounded by the global trend toward urbanization. Harvard University recently hosted a wide-ranging discussion titled, “The Future of Cities: Water,” which assembled an international panel of experts to provide insights into the challenges of water-related climate change as well as potential solutions for a broad range of city environments.

The Chile-based global architect–and this year’s ULI J.C. Nichols lauraeate–has made extraordinary contributions to the design of affordable housing, public spaces, infrastructure, and transportation.

New, tech-based companies create temporary apartment hotels, monetize absorption vacancies, and stimulate urban mixed-use projects.

For more than a decade, online hospitality marketplaces such as Airbnb, HomeAway, Vrbo, and others have disrupted the global lodging industry by offering inexpensive short-term rental accommodations. But almost from their inception, these online marketplaces have been at loggerheads with officials and local communities who blame the firms for reducing tax revenue, causing havoc in some neighborhoods, and raising housing prices.

A midyear survey of home sales rates at the 50 top-selling master-planned communities (MPCs) in the United States indicates the potential for a 10 percent increase by the end of 2019 compared with last year. That exceeds expectations, according to RCLCO’s report, Top-Selling Master-Planned Communities Mid-Year 2019. The listed communities, on average, are experiencing 3 percent growth in sales over midyear 2018.