Property Types

Perhaps nothing illustrates the precipitous fall of the U.S. resort sector as the saga that put a quartet of household-name properties under the control of a sovereign wealth fund.

Three years into the recovery of the destination resort sector, the wayside remains littered with casualties from the previous boom-and-bust cycle. The primary culprit: crushing debt.

Chicago is experiencing a surge of hotel development—and seeing the repurposing of classic historic structures in the process.

E-commerce has been the fastest-growing segment of the retail market for the last four years and can be expected to be a large share of the market for the next 15 to 20 years. Fulfillment centers have become the new face of industrial warehouse development, according to panelists at the ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago.

Resources that drove the old industrial economy—a central location and access to power—plus available industrial space, give Chicago an edge in the data center business.

Traditional industries, including energy and autos, are making a comeback in the United States. Their resurgence may present new opportunities for real estate investment.

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.

Voted one of TimeOutmagazine’s “Coolest 40 Neighborhoods in the World,” Uptown is a diverse community on the North Side of Chicago. ULI Fall Meeting attendees got the opportunity to tour the neighborhood, which offers spectacular lakeside views, a growing entertainment district, and a thriving food and cultural scene.

Those who attend the 2021 ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago will have the opportunity to tour mixed-use development near Wrigley Field.

Climate considerations have increasingly become a critical focus for real estate owners, operators, and investors over the past few decades, particularly as the frequency of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters has surged. Beyond the headline-grabbing events, more frequent temperature extremes and less stable energy costs have real financial implications for owners and residents. Key changes in our operating environment include:

Recently, three new senior housing apartment towers opened in the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon.

As California pushes toward a clean energy future, the city of San José has emerged as a leader in building electrification, offering valuable lessons for other cities nationwide. With residential buildings representing the largest source of natural gas use in the city, San José’s initiatives aim to reshape how these buildings are powered while prioritizing community needs, equity, and affordable housing. In 2022, ULI partnered with San Jose on an Advisory Services Panel (ASP) to inform this policy direction for multifamily buildings of all types. The aim of the ASP was to support the city in enabling property owners to step up their electrification retrofit efforts, encourage the adoption of on-site solar and batteries, and move the market forward.

In a period short on opportunities and long on challenges, design matters even more. Good design principles are always worth employing, whatever the development climate, but three key design aspects pertain in particular: alliance, resilience, and quality.

Despite headwinds, debt funds continue to fill the void in commercial real estate financing.

Eight years ago, the landmark Paris Agreement kicked off a worldwide campaign to reduce carbon emissions. The targets set were big: slash emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and be net zero by 2050. So far, the world is not making enough progress on those lofty goals, and the progress that has been made has been very unevenly distributed. Experts from major real estate firms, including Boston Properties, CBRE, and Community Preservation Corporation, drove home the net zero transition’s importance during a panel discussion at the 2024 ULI Spring Meeting in New York City. They talked about the costs of getting to net zero, what lenders and owners are doing to get there, and the risk of not addressing climate change.

Since 2014, the United States has averaged 300,000 more household formations per year than residential permits issued. While the number of residential construction workers has increased to meet the need, more housing is still needed. If the United States could return to pre-2006 ratio of 2.1 new residential permits for every residential construction worker, there would be almost 400,000 additional housing permits per year, all without adding a single new employee.

Whether it’s evaluating the negative impacts of single-family zoning in cities or blending single-family rental communities with apartments, developers are working to create more housing by taking new approaches, said panelists during the 2020 ULI Tampa Trends event.

The latest research from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies highlights a problem that many communities are experiencing firsthand—that the cost burden for rental housing is expanding and pushing higher up the income ladder to affect middle-income households more significantly.

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.