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
Holiday travelers may notice that airport-connected hotels are incorporating more regional touches, from façade to dining. Here are five examples that offer the ultimate luxury, a short walk from guest room to terminal.
The hotel industry in the United States faces complex challenges in 2025, according to Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality analytics for the CoStar Group. During the “State of the U.S. Hotel Industry” presentation at the ULI 2025 Spring Meeting in Denver, Colorado, Freitag highlighted the challenges facing the hotel business amid macroeconomic uncertainty.
Once a sprawling expanse of uncharted land, Las Vegas, Nevada, has evolved into the entertainment capital of the world, a gaming super-hub, and a premier destination for sports. This remarkable transformation didn’t happen overnight; it stemmed from decades of strategic planning, investment, and visionary zoning recommendations.
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
Finding detailed information on buildings—as well as the companies and people associated with them—is expensive, time consuming, and often difficult. But a new website, Honestbuildings.com, is intended to make such information as easy to find—and relationships as easy to build—as it is to look up old college roommates on Facebook.
Deep in Hong Kong’s core, 17 floors of a run-down building full of transients provide a key to understanding globalization from the bottom up. Gordon Mathews’s new book paints a detailed portrait of life in and around Chungking Mansions.
Capitalizing on an old warehouse district helped turn around a downtown.
Multifamily
With more than $3.6 billion in investment taking place in its downtown alone, Indianapolis has been on the radar of many out-of-state investors. At a recent ULI Indiana event, panelists described the investment appeal of secondary cities.
Micro-housing builder Kasita says it has solved the problems of modular construction. The Austin-based company is at the ULI Spring Meeting in Detroit meeting with developers and showing off a prototype of its 352-square-foot home.
The surveys and interviews for the Emerging Trends in Real Estate® 2018report were complete; the data had been compiled, and the reports had been written. Then, for some of the major U.S. Sun Belt cities, everything changed. Historic storms raged across the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean, destroying property and lives and upending all the forecasts and predictions for property markets in the Southeast. Investors and developers were sent scrambling to reassess their analysis and financial models.
Office
Three of the primary participants in the creation of Amazon’s headquarters in downtown Seattle came together during the 2017 ULI Spring Meeting for a discussion of the long history.
Some of America’s largest and oldest industrial powerhouses are moving their headquarters locations from bucolic suburban office parks to vibrant downtown neighborhoods, positioning themselves for growth in the digital age. Two such relocations—Weyerhauser and General Electric—were discussed at the ULI Spring Meeting in Seattle.
Hong Kong remained the world’s highest-priced office market last year, according to CBRE Group’s latest survey. Four of the top five fastest-growing markets for prime office rent were in Europe, with Stockholm, Berlin, and Dublin joining Belfast on the list.
Residental
South Quarter IV, a housing development in Minneapolis, has been selected by the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing as the winner of the 2016 Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award.
The city of Chicago’s Troubled Building Initiative was selected by the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing as the winner of the 2016 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.
At least 5.5 million units of naturally occurring affordable rental housing exist in cities across the United States, according to newly released data from CoStar, a leading provider of data and analytics for the commercial real estate industry. In an age of dwindling public subsidies for affordable housing, the concept of preserving naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) is gaining currency.
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.