Property Types
Hotels and Resorts
The Commercial Mortgage Alert Trepp weekly survey of 15 active portfolio lenders was unchanged between September 17th and September 24th. During the period, 10-year Treasury bond yields declined 9 basis points, with average all-in cost equal to equal to 4.80 percent.
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.
Industrial
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.

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.
Mixed-Use
Fighting back at online retailers, shopping venues focus on the intersection of needs and desires.
Housing will be the biggest challenge for the coming wave of aging baby boomers, said speakers at a recent Atlantic forum in Washington, D.C.. With neither adequate zoning nor a sufficient stock of “age-appropriate” housing, America is not prepared for the predicted surge in the number of senior citizens, panelists said.
When we talk about mixed-use development, we don’t typically have in mind a compound featuring bail bondsmen, pawn shops, and garages that specialize in muffler repair.
Multifamily
How did Reston Town Center, set some 20 miles (32 km) from the nation’s capital in the leafy suburbs of Northern Virginia, generate premium real estate values and become desirable enough to compete for the best tenants? It is a story dating back more than 30 years, the product of critical decisions made by a host of real estate professionals, public officials, planners, and designers.
As one of the fastest growing and most populous metropolitan areas in the United States, the Phoenix metro area has seen some 40,000 apartments built since 2010, with demand and prices continuing to rise. Panelists speaking at the ULI Arizona Trends Day in Phoenix provided a glimpse of how different product types are filling needs for the housing-strapped region.
Speaking at ULI Arizona’s Trends Day, held in January at the JW Marriott Phoenix Desert Ridge in Phoenix, an entrepreneur described how there is still room for differentiation in the growing shared-workspace industry.
Office
Hong Kong has surpassed London’s West End as the world’s most expensive office market, according to new research from Cushman & Wakefield. Using proprietary data, the report ranks occupancy costs per workstation as well as workplace densities for newly developed or refurbished office space globally. At a global level, the average annual cost per workstation rose by 1.5 percent over the past 12 months.
Four takeaways on the use of data science to measure professionals’ interactions in new office designs based on the new Boston Consulting Group workplace at New York City’s 10 Hudson Yards.


The transformation of office space continues, with collaborative, shared spaces replacing traditional private offices and cubicles.
Residental
An affluent community dominated by luxury homes and high-end resorts, Florida’s Collier County has struggled to meet demand for workforce housing. A ULI Advisory Service program panel recommended practical strategies for addressing this shortage.
The latest research from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, makes a solid case that the U.S. housing market is firmly on the road to recovery. Yet the report also shines a spotlight on the problems still in play, namely insufficient supply and rising costs that are creating challenges for both renters and homebuyers.
Experts in housing discuss prospects for this year, the preferences of millennial buyers, the importance of providing communities with a strong sense of place, strategies for making homes more affordable, and other trends.
Retail
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.