“The broader Australian economy is strong,” explains Roy Sheargold, Chairman of the Sheargold Group, a property development company in Sydney, Australia and a ULI Foundation Trustee. “As a result, confidence in commercial real estate is re-emerging and vacancy rates are falling.” Read what is fueling the economy in Australia, what development is underway and what experts think the market holds.

The Commercial Mortgage Alert Trepp weekly survey of 15 active portfolio lenders widened between October 8th and October 15th. During the period, 10-year Treasury bond yields remained flat, with average all-in cost equal to equal to 4.86 percent.

The hotel sector is coming back slowly in the United States, led by business travelers, but the majority of the growth in the full-service hotel market is overseas, said Bill Marriott, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Marriott International at ULI’s Fall Meeting. Marriott described how his firm is adapting to changing market conditions and shared his views on U.S. policies affecting the business community. Read a summary of the key topics he touched on.

The Commercial Mortgage Alert Trepp weekly survey of 15 active portfolio lenders trended higher with average spreads up 8 basis points (0.08 percent) between September 3rd and September 17th. During the period, 10-year Treasury bond yields declined 14 basis points, with average all-in cost equal to equal to 4.89 percent.

The Commercial Mortgage Alert Trepp weekly survey of 15 active portfolio lenders continued to trend lower with average spreads down 5 basis points (0.05 percent) between September 3 and September 10. During the period, 10-year Treasury bond yields increased 4 basis points, with average all-in cost equal to equal to 4.95 percent.

The Commercial Mortgage Alert Trepp weekly survey of 15 active portfolio lenders continued to trend lower with average spreads down 5 basis points. During the period, 10-year Treasury bond yields increased 9 basis points. Spreads in the August 31 Cushman & Wakefield Sonnenblick-Goldman fixed and floating mortgage rate survey came in slightly.

No one wants an unsafe, uninviting street. So why has this been so difficult to change? And in places where people have successfully initiated change, what are they doing differently?

St. Elizabeths, a historic former psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., in the process of being transitioned to mixed use, added a showpiece last fall—the Gateway DC pavilion.

In the 1970s, Ron Basford, a Canadian Cabinet minister and loyal Vancouverite seized on the idea of converting Granville Island into a special place.

A ULI member from the San Francisco Bay area weighs the pros and cons of converting the HVAC system of a 1960s-era office building.

According to survey data from the latest ULI Real Estate Economic Forecast, the current economic recession will be short-lived in the United States, with above-average gross domestic product growth returning in 2021 and 2022. Second, the impact on real estate market conditions and values will be relatively modest and much less severe than the impact experienced during the global financial crisis, with some exceptions by sector.

Aging high-rise residential towers in the city of Toronto are home to nearly 13 percent of the current population, but are falling behind on maintenance. A ULI Advisory Services panel was invited to evaluate a range of solutions.

Hong Kong Central remained the most expensive office market in the world, according to CBRE’s annual Global Prime Office Occupancy Costsreport. Hong Kong Central’s overall prime occupancy costs of US$307 per square foot (US$3,305 per sq m) per year topped the “most expensive” list, followed by London’s West End, Beijing’s Finance Street, and Hong Kong’s Kowloon.

While commercial real estate investors generally take a positive view on coworking, maintaining a balance of traditional and coworking space in a building is critical when it comes to creating long-term capital value. According to a CBRE survey, investors say that a coworking occupancy of a third of the space or less, with a qualified operator, supports a healthy capital value.

Speaking at a ULI Minnesota event, Kevin Cavenaugh, owner of Portland-based Guerrilla Development, said bigger is not necessarily better, and oftentimes it is worse, in terms of the complexity and risk.

State governments, in partnership with cities and other local jurisdictions, can and should do more to promote housing development and choice through smarter local land use policies and incentives, according to a new ULI report.

Newark’s Hahne & Co. Building, Boston’s Mosaic on the Riverway, and Austin’s Wildflower Terrace were selected by the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing as the winners of the 2017 Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award. The annual award, which honors developments that ensure housing affordability for people in a broad range of incomes, is given to developments in which all or a portion of the units are affordable to households earning up to 120 percent of the area median income.

Washington, D.C.’s Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) has been selected by ULI’s Terwilliger Center for Housing as the winner of the 2017 Robert C. Larson Housing Policy Leadership Award, an annual recognition of the innovative ways the public sector is addressing the country’s affordable housing crisis. DCHD, chosen for the award by a jury of national housing industry leaders, was honored during the Terwilliger Center’s Housing Opportunity Conference in New Orleans.

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.

The OAK project began in 2009, when a development firm set their sights on the corner of Northwest Expressway and North Pennsylvania Avenue, the state’s most important and busiest retail intersection. As the region’s only parcel capable of supporting a vertically integrated project of this scale and density, that land represented an opportunity to create something truly special.

As aging retail continue to evolve, one increasingly popular trend has been to redesign malls as town centers—recalling a time when such commercial districts were the heart and soul of a community. Mall–to–town center retrofits are emerging throughout the nation, especially in suburban communities, where pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use environments are highly attractive to millennials now raising families.