The focus of most panelists at ULI’s Latin America Conference, held in late October, was on the stronger markets, including Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. There also was optimism about a turnaround in Brazil and Argentina’s most recent election.

Newly confident and deep-pocketed consumers are driving vacation-home sales to levels that have not been seen in a decade, said panelists at the ULI Fall Meeting. But prices have not yet reached previous peaks, and buyers are increasingly cautious and cost-conscious.

In a competitive global market, resort designers are racing to define the “new luxury.” The modern concept of luxury is “really about elegance and simplicity,” said Richard Centolella, a principal in design firm EDSA, during a panel discussion at the ULI Fall Meeting.

Commercialized marijuana is big business and is expanding as a new asset class at an astronomical rate, according to a ULI Spring Meeting panel of industry investors, operators, and legal experts on the state of the cannabis business and real estate opportunities being created in the sector. Twenty-eight states have legalized the sale of medical marijuana, and eight states plus the District of Columbia allow recreational marijuana to some degree.

Breweries have an almost magical ability to revitalize neighborhoods and even entire towns, according to panelists speaking at ULI’s 2017 Carolinas Meeting.

Last month, Cushman & Wakefield reported that U.S. industrial markets absorbed 63.6 million square feet (5.9 million sq m) of space in the final quarter of 2016, which propelled net absorption for the year to a record-setting 282.9 million square feet (26.3 million sq m). According to the company, the U.S. industrial vacancy rate for all product types continued to decline in the fourth quarter, falling 30 basis points (bps) from the prior quarter and 100 bps from the prior year to 5.5 percent.

As communities and cities across the country face mounting land use and environmental challenges, Hilco Redevelopment Partners (HRP) and Melissa Schrock, HRP’s executive vice president of mixed-use development, are working to ensure urban redevelopment is a force for positive change.

Curating and creating great spaces is at the heart of what industry players in the built environment sector do every day. Placemaking is the “art and science” of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Can transit-integrated development like RUS Bus in Raleigh, North Carolina, help our cities thrive for the long haul?

ULI and research partner RCLCO have released the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing’s 2025 Home Attainability Index, a data-rich tool measuring affordability, connectivity, racial disparity, and growth across the United States at the MSA, county, and census tract levels.

Demand is surging for senior housing as America’s population ages, but supply continues to lag. That gap is one reason investors in ULI’s 2025 Emerging Trends report rated the sector second highest for the best risk-adjusted returns over the next three years. Supply and demand dynamics don’t tell the whole story, though: senior housing development tends to thrive at the upper end, where seniors with means can afford to live in a continuing care retirement community.

In the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, two not-for-profit organizations—Fresh Hope Communities, the public benevolent institution entity of churches of Christ in NSW and ACT, and Nightingale Housing of Brunswick, Victoria—came together to develop a building that contains 54 units renting at 80 percent of market rates as well as two community-focused commercial spaces. The Churches of Christ Property Trust has provided a 99 year lease for the land, which allows the units to remain affordable far beyond a more typical 10-year period.

St. Louis, long known as the Gateway to the West, is rapidly becoming the gateway to the region’s future. Diverse communities have begun working together to make the city a major hub for cutting-edge innovations in aerospace, agriculture, finance, transportation, biosciences, entertainment, and much more. The St. Louis Economic Development Partnership is dedicated to finding economic development partners who can help companies thrive in greater St. Louis, regardless of their size, and at the same time help those companies to deliver new opportunities into under resourced neighborhoods.

West Main, a 1,030,000-square-foot (95,690 sq m) office, retail, and mixed-use project, is the new home to some of Amazon’s 12,000-person workforce in Bellevue, Washington. The three-building project, designed by Graphite Design Group in collaboration with Compton Design Office for Vulcan Real Estate, is transforming this city neighboring Seattle to the east.

ULI San Francisco recently hosted a panel revisiting the recommendations made by ULI Advisory Servies panelists to revive the downtown and highlighting the progress that has been made.

Located in Santa Ana, California, La Placita Cinco is an innovative $31.4 million mixed-use project and a great example of how developers can revitalize aging retail.

Developers build single-story, single-family detached housing units in multifamily communities to rent at premiums over multistory projects.

As attention turns to what real estate markets may be like once the COVID-19 pandemic has wound down, the outlook for office properties is particularly hazy. More than a year of home-based work left office spaces idle, and it remains unknown how many people will resume their daily commutes once health conditions and local regulations permit.

Ten remade shopping centers exemplify opportunities for transformation.

A compact new Denver IKEA uses geothermal and solar energy, coupled with parking ramp conveyors, to create a more land- and energy-efficient alternative to sprawling big-box stores.