Best-selling author, entrepreneur, and New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway issued an impassioned call for the government breakup of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple, telling attendees at the 2018 ULI Fall Meeting that the four giants of the digital-age economy have grown too large and powerful.
Technological innovations ranging from sophisticated sensors to algorithms that sift through mountains of operational data to extract new insights are taking hold across the commercial real estate sector. But it is crucial to avoid becoming distracted by the allure of innovation for its own sake, and concentrate on how to assimilate advances in a way that generates value for companies and their clients, according to panelists at the 2018 ULI Fall Meeting in Boston.
Speaking at the ULI Fall Meeting, panelists said that even as experimentation with blockchain continues “fiercely,” the business world is now taking a tougher look at blockchain applications and asking why so few proofs of concept have made it to the commercial phase. That scrutiny ultimately could lead to better, more useful applications.
Real estate companies are in a uniquely powerful position to promote diversity and inclusiveness, both within their own workforces and in the communities they develop, according to panelists at ULI’s 2018 Fall Meeting in Boston.
Autonomous vehicles will remake cities in ways we are only beginning to imagine. Architects and planners have to envision structures now that will fit into that future.
Just as millennials are belatedly entering the housing market in greater numbers, developers face a daunting array of challenges that they did not have when they erected starter homes for previous generations, compelling innovation.
The next-generation wireless telecommunications technology known as 5G, which will operate at vastly higher speeds and be able to handle many times more devices than existing 4G networks, is likely to have significant impacts on the real estate industry, a speaker said at the 2018 ULI Spring Meeting in Detroit.
Though driverless vehicles are expected to be commercially available in the next few years, the shift to their use is likely to occur gradually and in phases over several decades, panelists said at ULI’s Spring Meeting in Detroit. That long process will allow vehicles to be tested and improved. It also will enable the development of urban infrastructure—such as smart roads and traffic management systems that communicate continuously with many vehicles at once—that would make them work better, said panelists.
Companies may be starting to see that squeezing more employees into less space is starting to be counterproductive, but panelists at ULI’s 2018 Spring Meeting agreed that expansive offices were largely a thing of the past, especially with wireless communications and cloud-based applications increasingly allowing employees to get much of their work done off site.
Two developers who have been major forces behind the city’s resurgence said that the struggle to overcome hard times has positioned Detroit for robust growth.
