The latest research from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies highlights a problem that many communities are experiencing firsthand—that the cost burden for rental housing is expanding and pushing higher up the income ladder to affect middle-income households more significantly.

The top five Canadian real estate markets to watch in 2020 are Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, and Montreal, according to Emerging Trends in Real Estate ^® 2020.

China is a nation of more than 1 billion “digital-first” consumers, Jeffrey Towson, managing partner at Towson Group and a Peking University professor, said at a recent ULI event in Shanghai. Because these consumers are starting to act like an interconnected network—influencing each other and generating fresh ways of doing transactions—they are shaping how almost all companies do business.

Speaking at an event in New York City, Dror Poleg, a former real estate and technology executive and co-chair of ULI New York’s Technology and Innovation Council, said shifts in real estate often result from overlooked factors that alter its value, beginning in the faraway emergence of landlord/tenant relations out of feudalism and stretching to the innovations of today.

Members of ULI’s Asia Pacific Tech Council discuss the new council’s areas of focus, the interface between technology startups and the real estate industry, the challenges of incorporating rapidly evolving technologies, the promise of big data, and related trends.

Whereas the commercial sector increasingly is abandoning its old analog ways and shifting to property technology, or proptech, the buzzword for building-related applications, the real revolution will come when commercial real estate companies not only have amassed large amounts of data, but also have figured out how to combine information from different apps and turn that data into actionable intelligence, said panelists speaking at the 2019 ULI Fall Meeting.

Ian Wilson, senior vice president of nongaming operations and chief operating officer, Marina Bay Sands, addressed the 2019 ULI Asia Pacific Leadership Convivium, explaining how the resort-casino operator uses data in its operations.

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

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.

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.