Innovation Districts & Corridors
A sea change is taking place in the way companies use office space design, amenities, and location to attract the most talented employees to their firms. Speaking at a ULI Boston event in May, panelists said that while lease flexibility is key to attracting desirable tenants, so is the user experience of the building itself.
Detroit’s bankruptcy marked a turn in the fate of the city. Along with the economic downfall came rare opportunities for investment, creation, and collaboration.
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.
Could ownership of 250- to 400-square-foot (23 to 37 sq m) homes help low-income people acquire an asset and begin to accrue wealth? Panelists at the 2018 ULI Spring Meeting said it is certainly an idea worth trying.
E-commerce has brought industrial into the 21st century, said panelists at the ULI Spring Meeting, and technology has become more sophisticated in today’s industrial offerings. More important, industrial developers are constructing product that provides flexibility for tenant users, with more container parking storage and additional car parking if the tenant is an e-commerce user.
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.
Micro-housing builder Kasita says it has solved the problems of modular construction. The Austin-based company is at the ULI Spring Meeting in Detroit meeting with developers and showing off a prototype of its 352-square-foot home.
At a recent event hosted by ULI Washington, panelists discussed how U.S. and Chinese companies are continuing to work together. After record levels of U.S. investment from China in 2016, new controls on capital outflow and investors’ changing attitudes have slowed inflows, while domestic development in China has also shifted.
A graduate student team from Cornell University, two teams from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a team from the University of Maryland have been selected as the four finalists for the 16th annual ULI Hines Student Competition, an ideas competition that provides students the opportunity to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for a large-scale site in an urban area.
In a number of sessions at the ULI Europe Conference in Berlin, investment and development leaders shared their thoughts on the tech issues that they think hold the most promise to disrupt the industry—and the ones that keep them up at night.