According to a forecast by Marcus & Millichap, Minneapolis/St. Paul climbed two spots to head this year’s National Multifamily Index, as sustained apartment demand kept vacancy persistently tight, allowing for steady rent growth. San Diego also inched up two notches on solid rent growth to claim second place.

How is the sharing economy shaking up the real estate industry?

Japan’s hospitality sector, coworking across Asia’s cities, and core assets in Australia were picked as positive investment stories for the Asia Pacific region by a wide-ranging panel of experts at the ULI China Mainland Winter Meeting in Shanghai.

As we close the books on 2018, we look back on the topics that resonated most with the online readers of Urban Landin the past year. Thank you to all of ULI’s members who contributed their expertise to many of these articles.

Panelists at a recent ULI event talked about the region’s labor market and how rehabbing the suburbs to include more mixed-use amenities can drive retail transformation and denser development patterns.

Coworking reigns as a core strategy, rather than a craze, against the backdrop of commercial real estate evolving from a space-leasing business to a service-delivery business, said speakers at a ULI Houston luncheon in November.

Emerging Trends in Real Estate ^® Asia Pacific 2019, a real estate forecast jointly published by ULI and PwC, has Melbourne and Singapore as the top cities for investment in the region, followed by Sydney, Tokyo, and Osaka. The report, which is being released at a series of events across Asia over the next several weeks, provides an outlook on Asia Pacific real estate investment and development trends, real estate finance and capital markets, and trends by property sector and metropolitan area.

The Dodge Momentum Index moved 4.2 percent lower in October to 150.5 (2000=100) from the revised September reading of 157.0. The index is a monthly measure of the initial report for North American nonresidential building projects in planning, published by analytics and workflow provider for the construction industry Dodge Data & Analytics, which has been shown to lead construction spending for nonresidential buildings by a full year. October’s decline was the third-consecutive monthly decline.

The hotel industry in Japan is evolving, with new lodging models emerging, some of which incorporate elements of the burgeoning sharing economy. A panel of real estate and hotel experts at the ULI Japan Fall Conference, held in Tokyo in November, discussed the “capsule hotel” and other models in Japan.

The overall availability rate for U.S. office space was unchanged as of the end of the third quarter of 2018, remaining at 18.1 percent, according to the latest Savills Studley Report: National Office Sector from commercial services firm Savills Studley. San Francisco remains the tightest market in the country, with an availability rate of 9 percent, followed by Boston/Suffolk County, 9.7 percent; New York City, 11.6 percent; and Austin, 12.8 percent.