Commercial property prices continued to rise across the largest gateway markets globally in 2018, according to data provided by RCA, but the pace of growth slowed from previous years. Cities in the Asia Pacific region, including Melbourne, Seoul, and Singapore, led the pack in the latest “RCA CPPI RCA’s Global Cities” report rankings.

Many U.S. cities are developing aggressive sustainability targets. Because the real estate sector accounts for half or more of their carbon emissions, cities are looking for strategies to engage the industry as part of their climate mitigation plans. The second ULI City and Real Estate Sustainability Summit, held at the 2018 Fall Meeting in Boston, explored what makes a successful public/private partnership and how the real estate industry has used them in the past.

While the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) region has been highly successful in drawing corporate relocations to the area, city leaders, speaking at a ULI North Texas event, said that the main weakness in Amazon’s eye for the e-commerce giant’s second headquarters (HQ2) was an insufficient amount of existing and available talent.

Minnesota’s urban and rural mayors are putting partisan politics aside and joining forces to find common ground on issues that include housing, transportation, and the workforce in an effort led by the ULI district council for the Twin Cities region.

A massive infrastructure program is interconnecting the cities of China’s Greater Bay Area and opening up a wealth of real estate opportunities. Attendees of the ULI Asia Pacific Leadership Convivium, held in Shenzhen in March, heard two presentations on the region, which includes the cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, and Zhaoqing as well as the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

San Antonio’s office and residential developers are backing up their commitment to sustainability with innovative projects that are saving energy, water, and money. Executives from three companies described their efforts at the ULI San Antonio Sustainability Forum in February.

A graduate student team from the University of Cincinnati, two teams from the University of Texas at Austin, and a team with students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have been selected as the four finalists for the 17th annual ULI Hines Student Competition, an ideas competition that challenges graduate students to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for an actual site in an urban area. This year’s competition involves the redevelopment of a site in Cincinnati comprising portions of a highway, the central business district, and the central riverfront along the Ohio River.

Though real estate experts keep worrying about a possible recession, the U.S. economy continues to perform well, and the prospects for real estate investment are still strong, panelists said at a ULI New York event in Manhattan during January.

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.

In addition to the gyrations of the stock market, the rate on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes surged past the 3 percent level into late September and early October. And yet, even with the turmoil in the financial markets, cap rates were unchanged to down from a year earlier in the fourth quarter.