Property Types

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.

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 developments mean we stop thinking so much about buildings as buildings but as communities,” said Richard Vogel, senior vice president and general manager of Ivanhoe Cambridge China, at ULI’s Asia Pacific Summit. These substantial and often iconic developments are a weighty undertaking, crucial to the regeneration and improvement of cities, particularly in rapidly urbanizing countries such as China and India.

“The attributes of the single-family house are becoming obstacles to aging in place well,” with the distance from shops and services and the lack of walkability, said Ellen Dunham Jones, architecture professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We need to link the needs of the aging population with dead big-box stores and dying malls.”

Telecommuters are an expanding workforce sector with needs different from those of typical workers. Many of these needs could be met by a new type of home-office building. In addition, energy efficiencies and an improved quality of life for telecommuters could be achieved.

Landlords are confident that apartments are not overbuilt, and rents continue to increase in many markets, but real estate investment trust investors are less certain. This year, deliveries are reaching new peaks, and investor worries about a market softening are reflected in the sector’s –1.12 percent year-to-date total return. Plus, interest rate survey data from Trepp.

What millennials will do once they marry and have children, a restrictive lending environment, and flat income growth were among the topics discussed at the third annual Butcher Forum, an invitation-only gathering in April of the top executives who represent the multifamily housing industry in the United States.

“Suburbs isn’t a dirty word,” declared Adam F. Ducker, RCLCO managing director and moderator of the “Next Stop Suburbs” session at the ULI Spring Meeting in Philadelphia.

Dallas was an appropriate location for a 2016 ULI Fall Meeting discussion on energizing corporate campuses, with several large-scale headquarter developments underway in the region.

In the late 2000s, Anthony E. Malkin, chairman and chief executive of Empire State Realty Trust, joined forces with a coalition of businesses and environmental organizations to launch an ambitious $20 million retrofit of the Empire State Building with the aim of reducing the iconic New York City office tower’s energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by more than one-third.

One of the largest eat/work/ play/live developments in Texas, the $3 billion Legacy West project is attracting companies like Toyota, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, and Liberty Mutual by focusing on the interests of generation X and millennial employees.

Affordable housing means many different things across the Asia Pacific region, but in every nation, the driving issue in its provision is the cost of land. That should come as no surprise; the Asian population of 4.3 billion represents 57 percent of the world total, according to United Nations data, but Asia has only 30 percent of the world’s land mass.

What matters most to college students living off campus? Members of ULI’s Student Housing Council discuss how private developers of student housing can create residences that appeal to students, their parents, and their academic institutions; which amenities are most in demand; which technological features are most important; and other trends.

A resurgence of office-to-residential conversions is happening in markets around the world. What conditions are necessary to make it work?

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.