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.

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.

A ULI Advisory Services panel will visit the city of Georgetown and Georgetown County to advise representatives on how best to transform a 150-acre (61 ha) site into a catalyst for economic development.

UnCommons was initially designed before the pandemic and then modified in response to it.

Attendees of ULI’s 2022 Fall Meeting in Dallas will have the chance to visit two master-planned communities northwest of the city’s downtown.

ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT:When the old Michael Reese Hospital, dating to the 1880s, closed in 2009, the city rounded up the money to buy the 50-acre (20 ha) site, added more land around it, and then submitted a bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics with a new stadium replacing the hospital as the centerpiece. Chicago eventually lost that bid but has not given up on the site since.

Multifamily experts gathered at the University of Southern California to highlight where denser construction is creating affordability.

With insights and research from a ULI Technical Advisory Panel and ULI’s Terwilliger Center, the Austin Housing Conservancy fund, a revolutionary approach to preserving workforce housing, was born. Now known as the Texas Housing Conservancy, the fund became the nation’s first to combine a nonprofit investment manager, Affordable Central Texas, with an open-end private equity fund.

At ULI Chicago’s October gathering at the new 73-story 1000M apartment tower, located at 1000 S. Michigan Ave., key members of the building’s development, architecture and construction teams hosted a tour of the project and enlightened attendees with a panel discussion on the history behind the skyscraper’s signature cantilever.

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.

RXR CEO and Chairman Scott Rechler, in a recent ULI members-only webinar with ULI Foundation Chair Faron A. Hill, described the challenges and opportunities ahead as an epic, unavoidable storm. “That hurricane … eventually, it’s going to hit land,” Rechler warned. “The question is when it hits, how hard it hits, and where it hits the hardest.”

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.

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.

After a quiet first half of 2024, CMBS originations increased 59 percent in Q3 on a year-over-year basis, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Quarterly Survey.

Northern Mexico has experienced a significant expansion in the Mexican industrial real estate sector since its major decline from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, due, in part, to low-cost production in China. During the pandemic, that trend began to shift.