Property Types

ULI Property Types provides insights into challenges, opportunities, and innovations specific to each property type, supporting developers, investors, planners, and policymakers in making informed decisions and responding to dynamic market conditions. It organizes and showcases content on the major real estate classifications — including hotels and resorts, industrial, mixed-use, multifamily, office, residential, and retail — to help industry professionals understand how different segments perform and evolve.
Hotels and Resorts
Holiday travelers may notice that airport-connected hotels are incorporating more regional touches, from façade to dining. Here are five examples that offer the ultimate luxury, a short walk from guest room to terminal.
The hotel industry in the United States faces complex challenges in 2025, according to Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality analytics for the CoStar Group. During the “State of the U.S. Hotel Industry” presentation at the ULI 2025 Spring Meeting in Denver, Colorado, Freitag highlighted the challenges facing the hotel business amid macroeconomic uncertainty.
Once a sprawling expanse of uncharted land, Las Vegas, Nevada, has evolved into the entertainment capital of the world, a gaming super-hub, and a premier destination for sports. This remarkable transformation didn’t happen overnight; it stemmed from decades of strategic planning, investment, and visionary zoning recommendations.
Industrial
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.
Standing in the shadow of Regions Field and within earshot of Railroad Park, Birmingham’s Urban Supply hints at what the next chapter of downtown life could look like. Once-quiet brick warehouses are being steadily reimagined into patios, storefronts, and gathering spaces along a new pedestrian alley. Early tenants have begun to open their doors, and programming is slowly bringing people into the district. While the project is still in its early stages, the framework is in place for a vibrant hub that will grow block by block in the years ahead.
What trends are shaping the future of the industrial sector? Four experts from ULI’s Industrial and Office Park Development Council talk about the industrial submarkets and property types that offer the greatest opportunities, challenges developers face in bringing new projects to market, ways artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are reshaping the sector, tenant priorities, and other key trends.

Mixed-Use
From stadium-anchored destinations to experience districts, successful mixed-use sports and entertainment developments are evolving into adaptable, community-centered places that deliver cultural relevance, financial performance, and economic activity every day.
Despite a perfect storm of housing shortages, climate risks, and stalled downtowns, urban design is emerging as a positive, coordinating force to meet these challenges, bridging policy, capital, and community to achieve a common goal. Gensler’s latest research highlights where cities are already adopting this new ethos—and what civic leaders need to do now.
In the Belgian municipality of Edegem, a 20-minute bike ride from Antwerp’s city center, a camera film roll packing plant has become Minerve, a biodiverse, sustainable mixed-use residential and commercial neighborhood.
Multifamily
A new report by the construction scheduling platform Planera shows which U.S. states are adding the most new housing in 2025.
A New Era for Pier Sixty-Six: Blending Historic Preservation with Luxury Innovation
“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.”
Office
One of nine supertall buildings under construction in Toronto, SkyTower will offer residential, hotel, and amenity space
Established in 1914, the Cleveland Foundation is a community-oriented, philanthropic organization dedicated to investing in worthy individuals and nonprofit organizations in greater Cleveland, Ohio. With the lease running out on its existing headquarters in the city’s Playhouse Square district, the foundation decided to build its own headquarters, but in an intentional way that would spur economic development in one of the city’s neglected pockets.
FORUM, a life sciences building developed by Lendlease, is the first purpose-built life sciences building in Boston Landing, a mixed-use district in the city’s Allston-Brighton neighborhood. Targeting LEED Platinum, the recently opened building employs numerous strategies that enable companies to meet stringent regulatory requirements, reduce their carbon footprint, and achieve net zero operations.
Residental
U.S. President Donald J. Trump signed the nearly 900-page One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4. The budget reconciliation legislation extends numerous provisions included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that directly affect commercial real estate, including reinstatement of bonus depreciation and extension of the Qualified Opportunity Zone Program. It also incorporates provisions aimed at incentivizing affordable housing, including a significant expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. At the same time, the new law makes major cuts to wind and solar incentives.
Five experts from ULI’s Residential Neighborhood Development Council discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead for homebuilders; what buyers and renters want from their neighborhoods, and how they value sustainability and resilience; what state and local housing policies are effectively encouraging housing construction; and other trends.
Amblebrook, an innovative retirement community in the historic setting of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was specifically designed to remedy this social disease. It shatters the mold of the conventional 55-plus community.
Retail
The National Retail Federation predicts a record-breaking 2025 holiday season, with U.S. sales for November and December projected to grow between 3.7 percent and 4.2 percent—pushing total holiday sales past $1 trillion for the first time. Yet there also are signs that consumers are nervous; that mood, plus accounting for inflation, could leave holiday spending relatively flat.
From Dead Mall to Living District: Replacing the “Great Wall of Galleria” with a Connected Urban Core
For decades, civic leaders have tried to revitalize Market Street, San Francisco’s central thoroughfare, only to see their efforts founder. “I sometimes call it the great white whale of San Francisco,” says Eric Tao, managing partner at L37 Development in San Francisco and co-chair of ULI San Francisco. “Every new mayor, every new planning director, every new economic development director has chased that white whale.” This year, however, an international competition of ideas hosted and run by ULI San Francisco, with support from the ULI Foundation, generated fresh momentum for reimagining the boulevard. The competition drew 173 submissions from nine countries and sparked new conversations about the future of downtown San Francisco.