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
Far from being loners, singles in the city are creating connections—and vitality—says Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.
Museum Place, a large-scale infill development on an 11-acre (4.5 ha) site assembled in the cultural district of Fort Worth, Texas, is designed to knit 11 new structures into a finer-grained urban fabric of streets to connect to nearby museums and surrounding uses so it can flexibly mix offices, retail space, hotel space, and housing.
Multifamily
The “Markets to Watch” section of the 2017 edition of Emerging Trends in Real Estate® offers an expanded look at all 78 markets included in this year’s survey, including the industry outlook for the primary markets in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Here is the industry outlook for the primary markets in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
With Denver’s population expanding from about 470,000 in 1990 to 700,000 today, many longtime residents in some gentrifying neighborhoods find it difficult to remain as rents, home prices, and property taxes climb. How do communities in other U.S. cities provide for both lower-income families and local culture while being revitalized?
A new report published by ULI Boston/New England sheds light on the shrinking middle-class in the Greater Boston region due in part to the lack of affordable housing options for middle-income households.
Office
San Jose, California, and Seattle-Tacoma, Washington, hold the top two spots in Marcus & Millichap’s latest National Office Property Index (NOPI). Both markets boast vacancy rates below the national average and significant completions forecast for 2017.
How can land use foster the innovation economy? By partnering with anchor institutions and embracing the idea of a “minimum viable product,” where a stripped-down version is offered to early adopters and then modified based on the usage and other feedback, said development experts at a ULI Philadelphia event in February.
Real estate activity in America’s heartland is growing at a solid clip, driven by increases in employment, a recovering economy, and pent-up demand for new product.
Residental
Mercantile Place is a rental apartment community in downtown Dallas consisting of four separate and diverse buildings with a total of 704 apartments. Two of the apartment buildings were converted from office buildings, one of which was historic; the third is a renovated historic apartment building previously converted from office space; and the fourth is a new 15-story apartment building. Though the buildings are located on three separate blocks, they share amenities and parking, and the four buildings have been positioned and marketed together as one residential community.
Congress has thrown its support behind new legislation that aims to fix some of the problems in the condo financing program of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The Housing Opportunity through Modernization Act (H.R. 3700) will loosen some of the more stringent regulatory requirements specific to condo mortgage insurance that were introduced in the wake of the housing finance crisis.
The laws of supply and demand—and the need for neighborhood evolution—still apply when communities try to boost their supply of affordable housing.
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.