Since the nation is experiencing a “jobless recovery,” new office development is stagnant to nonexistent in most U.S. markets, conclude panelists at ULI’s Spring Council Forum. They agree that success in the office market will be measured submarket by submarket, and that for the immediate future, office development will mainly involve reusing and repositioning existing assets.

What is within our collective grasp may be nothing less than the fundamental revaluation and reinvention of what we mean by the city. It is only within the wider urban context of the life of cities that it becomes possible to address the future of what we may or may not continue to describe as the office. Learn three cautionary rubrics important to successful office design.

Under the “new normal” of retailing, shopping is an “experiential” activity done in more urban settings, there are lots of un- or under-employed consumers focused on prices, and Wall Street performance correlates with retail trends. Jon Eisen, managing principal of The Eisen Group in Washington, D.C., offered this take at an industry roundtable at ULI’s Spring Council Forum in Phoenix, Arizona. Read what panelists had to say about the future of retail and commercial property.

Laws and regulations affect all types of real estate in all markets, but perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in the nation’s capital. For this reason, federal rules and regulations for leased facilities are watched closely by private sector owners and developers of office space. Read what a panel of industry insiders at the recent ULI Washington Real Estate Trends Conference had to say about this topic.

Interest in reducing energy consumption in commercial buildings is gaining momentum in the public and private sectors. The efforts of both of these sectors took center stage at the Catalytic Convening on Energy Efficiency event, which brought together some 200 emerging leaders in the sustainability movement to discuss how to better align and advance the energy-efficient retrofit market. Read more.

The FTSE/NAREIT Equity REIT (real estate investment trust) Index was up 5.11 percent in April, up 13.00 percent through April 30th, and pays a 3.29 percent dividend, too. All 13 property sector sub-indices were positive in April, ranging from the leaders—office/industrial (+7.38 percent), regional malls (+7.15 percent), and diversified (+6.91 percent)—to the laggards—industrial (+2.13 percent), timber (+2.29 percent), and freestanding retail (+2.95 percent). Read about the year-to-date basis leaders and laggards.

Businesses, their organizational cultures, and their places of business are inextricably intertwined—so much so that organizational success depends in large part on the alignment of place assets with business direction and the agility of those assets in responding to business growth and change. Learn the six essential steps for successful strategic facility planning.

Whatever the principal reason, the nation’s largest banks reduced their holdings of commercial real estate loans in 2010 by approximately $75 billion (7.5 percent) to roughly $929 billion. Not surprisingly, the entire decline was associated with changes in one loan segment: land and construction loans. Total mortgages on income-producing commercial and multifamily property, however, remained relatively static at about $609 billion and $134 billion, respectively.

Washington, D.C., is not only the capital of the United States, but also the darling of the capital markets, with real estate that is “close to fully priced,” said Greg Vorwaller, head of global capital markets for Cushman & Wakefield, at ULI Washington’s annual Real Estate Trends Conference. But how long will the good times roll?

The so-called redline drawn around the Phoenix market by investors seems to have been erased, says Steve Betts, chair of ULI Arizona. He attributes the metropolitan area’s resurgence to HEAT—Health care, Energy, Aerospace/defense, and Technology. Read what other local players are saying about this uptick in activity and why it appears that the road to recovery will be a long and bumpy one.