Property Types

ULI Property Types provides insights into challenges, opportunities, and innovations specific to each property type, supporting developers, investors, planners, and policymakers in making informed decisions and responding to dynamic market conditions. It organizes and showcases content on the major real estate classifications — including hotels and resorts, industrial, mixed-use, multifamily, office, residential, and retail — to help industry professionals understand how different segments perform and evolve.
Hotels and Resorts
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.
Hotel fundamentals are improving as panic and capitulation give way to a slow-growth environment. Yet, the global response to the economic crisis threatens to yield to sovereign risk in Greece and Spain and undermine a gradual, nascent recovery. These were the major messages at the Jeffer Mangels Butler & Marmaro conference Meet the Money: Unlocking the Game Changers for the Coming Recovery, held in early May in Los Angeles.
Industrial
In 2025, the country’s industrial market is experiencing a rebalancing in the wake of surging demand and record new supply that marked the early pandemic years. New opportunities in fast-growing markets are emerging, and demand drivers are shifting. New space demand will grow the most, especially for small-bay industrial assets, according to a Q3 2025 report from the business advisory and accounting firm Plante Moran.
Birmingham’s Urban Supply hints at what the next chapter of downtown life could look like. Once-quiet brick warehouses are being reimagined into patios, storefronts, and gathering spaces along a new pedestrian alley.
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.

Mixed-Use
Rhode Island Row —a 2012 winner of a Terwilliger Center’s Jack Kemp Workforce Housing Models of Excellence Award—exemplifies Ron Terwilliger’s vision of mixed-income housing, which he considers the only viable solution to address the shortage of affordable housing near transit and employment hubs.
Located on a 3.18-acre (1.3 ha) one-block site in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Harper Court is a mixed-use project initiated by the city of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
Sullivan Center is a complex of nine historic structures in downtown Chicago that have been renovated and repositioned for modern uses.
Multifamily
Talk of a true urban “transformation” tends to carry more weight when it comes from a former police chief-turned-mayor speaking at a reinvented former trolley warehouse. The mayor of Tampa, Florida, Jane Castor, greeted attendees at a recent ULI Tampa Bay conference at the brick-walled Armature Works project.
First movers on using mass timber for both structural and design elements are seeing a growing wave of projects lining up before them. The regulatory environment is also adapting while the business model is expanding.
An area in Midtown Miami, split between the Wynwood and Edgewater neighborhoods, will be the study site for the 18th annual ULI Hines Student Competition.
Office
With roughly 58,000 people moving to the city of Tampa in 2016 alone, the region stands out as an example of accelerating U.S. growth. Water Street Tampa will give an urban facelift to Tampa’s skyline and double the downtown area in size.
Improved U.S. office market fundamentals should continue, downtown markets will receive a disproportionate amount of new supply, the tech sector likely will remain a primary demand driver, and occupiers will pursue space efficiency and agility this year, according to a CBRE report.
The highly coveted second corporate headquarters of e-commerce giant Amazon.com would be a welcome addition to Austin, but the $5 billion project undoubtedly would produce more housing and transportation woes in one of the fastest-growing regions of the United States, said panelists at a ULI Austin event.
Residental
Why do cities with the fastest-growing economies—including Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, and Austin--suffer from a growing imbalance between job growth and housing supply? A panel at the ULI 2017 Spring Meeting in Seattle examined why hot-market cities are failing to build enough housing for new workers, often by staggering ratios.
The ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing has announced the finalists for this year’s Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award, which honors exemplary developments that ensure housing affordability for people with a range of incomes. The award recognizes efforts by the development community to increase the supply of housing that is affordable to households earning less than 120 percent of the area median income.
Affordable and workforce housing policies and initiatives put in place by the governments of Washington, D.C.; Boston; Denver; and New York City have been selected as finalists for the 2017 ULI Larson Housing Policy Leadership Award
Retail
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.