Markets

Office sector distress hits a decade high with $51.6B in loan defaults, but investors are looking for opportunities to buy at a discount.

Four experts discuss how to rebuild urban cores by bringing the public and private sectors together to create thriving downtowns that entice remote workers to return to the office and broaden the mix of uses.

Consumers have kept a steady foot on the gas this year. A record-high 197 million consumers shopped in stores or online over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). The NRF forecasts that holiday sales will grow between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent, with total retail spending in the United States falling between $979.5 billion and $989 billion during November and December. That forecast also is consistent with NRF’s annual U.S. sales growth—between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent—for 2024.

In 2025, the country’s industrial market is experiencing a rebalancing in the wake of surging demand and record new supply that marked the early pandemic years. New opportunities in fast-growing markets are emerging, and demand drivers are shifting. New space demand will grow the most, especially for small-bay industrial assets, according to a Q3 2025 report from the business advisory and accounting firm Plante Moran.

Around the turn of the 21st century, downtown Kansas City, Missouri, faced challenges familiar to many American cities: abandoned buildings and surface parking lots filled 10 core blocks despite multiple redevelopment attempts dating to the 1960s. The downtown residential population was sparse, and some 60,000 downtown office workers made haste for the suburbs at 5 o’clock each weekday.

Drawing on insights from more than 1,700 leading real estate investors, developers, lenders and advisors across the U.S. and Canada, the report identifies key opportunities, risks and market shifts that will shape the industry in the coming year.

The Avenue, located at one of the most coveted corners in Hollywood’s current renaissance, was developed as a condominium by an affiliate of John Laing Homes, now submerged in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The seven-story condominium development was 70 percent complete when Laing halted construction. Read how the property is being repositioned and what the developer considers a key to its approach.

Given the distinctive character of individual communities, the special requirements of the populations, and the complexities of funding, developers of affordable housing regard every project as a unique opportunity that demands creativity, commitment, and patience. Read how Los Angeles–area private developers and their public partners are reshaping both the perception and reality of affordable housing.

U.S. architects are experimenting with designing net-zero-energy buildings—those that produce as much energy as they consume. Developers around the world are building modular housing to speed construction, reduce on-site labor expenses, and lower development costs. Now, an off-site systems building manufacturer has developed the first modular net-zero-energy townhouses as a demonstration project in Oakland, California.

By the end of 2019, the first families will move into new, million-dollar townhouses at Edge-on-Hudson, a $1 billion development that will eventually bring more than a thousand new residences to Sleepy Hollow, New York.

The Dodge Momentum Index moved 4.1 percent higher in September to 143.6 from the revised August reading of 137.9. The gain in September was due entirely to an 8.9 percent increase in the commercial component, while the institutional component fell 4.8 percent.

Cornell Tech Campus represents a new model for higher education in the United States. Located on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the campus is designed around the idea that industry and academia should be intertwined instead of siloed. Along with academic buildings, the development includes corporate co-location, offices, a hotel, a residential tower, and conferencing and assembly areas, with space remaining to accommodate future requirements of the program.

ULI’s Homeless to Housed (H2H) initiative, launched after publication of the report Homeless to Housed: The ULI Perspective in 2022, highlights the numerous real estate-driven solutions that have been undertaken in recent years to tackle the problems of affordable housing and homelessness in cities across the country.

Molly Maybrun, chief development officer of local developer Fifth Space, and Wallace Whittier, senior real estate officer for University of California, San Francisco, spoke at the 2025 ULI Fall Meeting about their collaboration to build a new proton therapy cancer center at Fifth Space’s Dogpatch Power Station, a multiphase master-planned mixed-use development on the waterfront at the southern edge of San Francisco’s Mission Bay.

“The primary advantage every modular project has, if you do it right, is time savings,” said Mark Donahue—principal, design, for Lowney Architecture—during the “Offsite Evolved: How Today’s Prefab, Modular, and 3D-Printing Solutions Deliver Proven Speed, Savings, and Scale” panel at the ULI Fall Meeting in San Francisco. “You can, on a, say, 24-month construction project, save six to eight weeks.”

One of nine supertall buildings under construction in Toronto, SkyTower will offer residential, hotel, and amenity space

Infrastructure Ontario’s Provincial Affordable Housing Lands Program aims to create a mix of market-rate housing and permanent, sustainable, affordable housing on surplus land in greater Toronto. For its first effort, the agency chose Dream Asset Management, Kilmer Group, and Tricon Residential to develop a mixed-use community with 2,500 apartments on a former brownfield industrial site.

Across North America, cities are confronting a housing crisis that demands urgent, innovative responses. In Toronto, the launch of the Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) in April 2020 marked a pivotal moment—an accelerated effort at the height of the pandemic to deliver safe, stable housing. Since then, unprecedented investments have been made in communities across Ontario to address housing insecurity, reshaping the province’s residential landscape.

Demand for Artificial Intelligence is moving data centers from “niche” to mainstream investment prospects and they continue to top sector rankings in western markets

Durkin joins ULI from BlackRock senior leadership, where he held the position of global head of real estate research and strategy. His appointment as CEO Europe marks a continuation of the Institute’s mission and momentum, reinforcing its focus on member value, decision-making relevance, and long-term impact across the built environment at a time of significant change for the industry in Europe and globally.

ULI Europe publishes new guide on asset-level collaboration to accelerate decarbonization of occupied buildings

With society and the real estate industry significantly behind on achieving the targets set in the Paris Agreement, and worsening affordability in Europe’s housing, ULI Europe’s C Change for Housing program has launched a landmark interactive systems map and companion report to help the real estate industry identify, co-create, and scale the solutions needed to decarbonize existing and future affordable housing.

Ten built environment projects from eight countries across the EMEA region have been announced as the finalists in the sixth annual ULI Europe Awards for Excellence, which recognize exemplary projects and programs in the private, public, and non-profit sectors. This year’s finalists comprise cutting edge refurbishment, restoration and new build projects, and include residential, healthcare, mixed use, education, community, laboratory, and office projects from Italy, Germany, the UK, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Spain.

Although ready to commence a new real estate cycle, real estate leaders globally are braced for another challenging year of uncertainty, with lingering inflation, largely driven by factors including geopolitical instability, and persistently higher interest rates in some regions, potentially delaying a hoped-for recovery in capital markets and occupancy metrics. This is according to the Emerging Trends in Real Estate^® Global Outlook 2025 from PwC and ULI, which provides an important gauge of global sentiment for investment and development prospects, amalgamating and updating three regional reports which canvassed thousands of real estate leaders across Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific.

In Part 1 of a three-part interview, the architect behind Shanghai’s Xintiandi reflects on his unconventional path and how preserving historic shikumen reshaped urban redevelopment in China.

In Part 3 of a three-part interview, the veteran architect reflects on construction, creativity, and why experiencing great cities matters more than relying on technology.

Shenzhen’s Nantou Ancient City project represents a groundbreaking approach to revitalizing China’s historic urban villages in a way that preserves their cultural heritage and community fabric. After China’s government designated Shenzhen as a Special Economic Zone in 1980, the city’s more than 400 urban villages grew rapidly to provide informal housing for an influx of migrant workers. The result: high-density residential areas that maximized rental income but often compromised on fire safety and hygiene standards.

The 2026 Emerging Trends in Real Estate® Asia Pacific report, published jointly by ULI and PwC found a mood of cautious optimism among real estate professionals; however, respondents described considerable disparities in markets and sectors across the region. Tokyo was ranked as the top city for investment in the Emerging Trends survey, top of the table for the third consecutive year, followed by Singapore, Sydney, Osaka, and Seoul.

A seminar organized by the ULI Singapore NEXT Committee presented attendees with the little-known concept of real estate “tokenization,” or fractional investing/trading, as a potential bridge between private investors and direct ownership. Although not new, tokenization in real estate is a niche market, particularly in Asia Pacific, with Singapore hosting a small number of the specialized digital platforms.

Once the site of an abandoned quarry, Singapore’s Rifle Range Nature Park now serves as a buffer zone protecting one of the island nation’s last primary rainforests, Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, from encroaching development and human activity. Located to the reserve’s south, Rifle Range is Singapore’s first net-positive energy nature park, harvesting more energy than its annual operational requirements.