With e-commerce’s stake in U.S. retail at less than 10 percent, suggestions of a “retail apocalypse” of brick-and-mortar stores is greatly exaggerated, panelists said during a ULI North Texas event on the retail sector. Still, panelists at an event in Dallas said the industry has to find new ways to reinvent itself and connect with customers in order to thrive.

Hong Kong has surpassed London’s West End as the world’s most expensive office market, according to new research from Cushman & Wakefield. Using proprietary data, the report ranks occupancy costs per workstation as well as workplace densities for newly developed or refurbished office space globally. At a global level, the average annual cost per workstation rose by 1.5 percent over the past 12 months.

Japan’s investment market is set fair for the future, with “the world’s most favorable borrowing environment” and increasing institutional demand for real estate. A panel of international investors discussed the 20-year outlook at the ULI Japan Fall Conference, which took place in Tokyo in November.

The Emerging Trends in Real Estate® Asia Pacific 2018report highlights the continued existence of excess liquidity in the region, with competition to buy prime assets in major Asian markets reaching “unprecedented levels.”

In many ways, ULI’s history in Japan is the history of that nation’s institutional real estate market, setting up shop in 1997, following the first opportunity funds that came to buy nonperforming loans in the 1990s and has grown to the present day, when a new wave of foreign core funds have begun to invest in Asia’s largest real estate market.

Philanthropist Annabelle Chauncy operates two schools in Uganda and in 2015 received the Medal of the Order of Australia for the charity she founded, School for Life. As she shared with attendees of a recent ULI Australia event in Sydney, the project had its fair share of obstacles.

ULI Toronto and PwC hosted a trends event to present the latest findings for Toronto and the rest of the Canadian market, including a keynote by Andrew Warren, director of real estate research for PwC.

Copenhagen and Madrid will join the ranks of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich as the top cities for real estate investment and development in 2018, according to Emerging Trends in Real Estate ^{® Europe 2018.}

The 2018 edition of Emerging Trends in Real Estate ^®, released at the 2017 ULI Fall Meeting, names Seattle as the top U.S. market for investment and development, thanks to its job opportunities, diverse economy, and educated workforce. The city, which was ranked fourth in the 2017 edition, ends the streak of Texas cities taking first place for the past three years.

Urban theorist Richard Florida warned of “a growing divide between places that are winning and places that are failing to keep up.” That societal split is the subject of his latest book, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It.