Experts in hotel development discuss the rising popularity of social spaces in hotels, the role of technology in the hotel experience, the ways guests are shaping in-room furniture design, the competition from Airbnb, the need for “Instagrammable” spaces in hotels, and changing approaches to hotel restaurants.

Florida remains one of the healthiest worldwide hospitality centers. Hotel occupancy in Miami-Dade rose to 87.9 percent in March from 85.7 percent in the same month last year, and the average daily room rate in was also up. At a panel discussion during ULI’s 2018 Florida Summit, two hotel developers shared how their decision to lean into the evolving trends within hospitality and tourism have bred overwhelming success.

To meet the evolving expectations of today’s travelers, new hotels are being infused with active, social spaces that encourage interaction between guests, offer unique experiences with local flavor, and provide healthy lifestyle amenities, said experts speaking at a ULI San Diego/Tijuana event.

With e-commerce players remaking the retail sector, industrial real estate developers are hustling to provide the infrastructure needed to get packages to doorsteps in hours instead of days.

Driven by an e-commerce boom, industrial real estate is in the midst of a golden age that shows no signs of waning, despite lingering concerns about the long-term health of traditional retailers, a group of industrial property managers said during a panel discussion at the 2017 Fall Meeting in Los Angeles.

The latest ULI Real Estate Economic Forecastis predicting more positive momentum ahead for both the economy and the commercial real estate industry through 2019. That being said, the pace of growth is slowing and the survey of 48 economists and analysts clearly reveals some lowering of expectations.

Experts say the real estate market in our cities is responding to the dramatic changes caused by COVID with a “flight to quality.” This headline suggests optimism that a safe harbor still exists out there as does the fear that we all need to act fast and run (for our lives) before things get bad. It reflects a winnowing to the essential characteristics that can ensure the best overall return and insulate us from the changing winds in the economy.

Neglected yet historic department store remade into a vibrant destination anchored by buzzy health food grocer Erewhon.

Cambridge Crossing, a 4.5 million-square-foot (418,063.7 square meters) mixed-use space in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of this year’s recipients of the ULI Americas Awards for Excellence. The roughly 43-acre (17.4 hectares) project, built at the site of an abandoned railyard, has about 2.4 million square feet (223,027 square meters) of residential space, including about 2,700 residential units, and the project had multiple master plans from different developers, dating as far back as 2003.

As the Fed began a series of rate hikes in 2022, the apartment market went from one of frenzied growth and optimism to a market characterized by decline, be it declining sales volume, declining occupancy, or declining values. As we near year’s end, stability and even positive momentum have begun to take hold, and there is good reason to expect them to carry into 2025 with the return of large, open-ended funds and an improved debt environment.

The U.S. multifamily market was on fire in 2021 and 2022, a time when rent growth hit record highs due to soaring demand. But the market has since come back down to Earth as fundamentals stabilized. Now, amid ongoing high interest rates, heightened deliveries of supply, and deceleration of job growth, many multifamily investors are exploring different strategies to diversify their portfolios, add revenue, take advantage of opportunities, and maintain a competitive edge.

Surge: Coastal Resilience and Real Estate, a ULI research report, documents the challenges associated with coastal hazards such as sea level rise, coastal storms, flooding, erosion, and subsidence, and provides best practices for real estate and land use professionals, as well as public officials, to address them.

St. Louis, long known as the Gateway to the West, is rapidly becoming the gateway to the region’s future. Diverse communities have begun working together to make the city a major hub for cutting-edge innovations in aerospace, agriculture, finance, transportation, biosciences, entertainment, and much more. The St. Louis Economic Development Partnership is dedicated to finding economic development partners who can help companies thrive in greater St. Louis, regardless of their size, and at the same time help those companies to deliver new opportunities into under resourced neighborhoods.

West Main, a 1,030,000-square-foot (95,690 sq m) office, retail, and mixed-use project, is the new home to some of Amazon’s 12,000-person workforce in Bellevue, Washington. The three-building project, designed by Graphite Design Group in collaboration with Compton Design Office for Vulcan Real Estate, is transforming this city neighboring Seattle to the east.

ULI San Francisco recently hosted a panel revisiting the recommendations made by ULI Advisory Servies panelists to revive the downtown and highlighting the progress that has been made.

Multifamily Tax Exemption Program makes housing affordable to more renters.

ULI’s Terwilliger Center for Housing is increasing its focus on work done at the district council level, Christopher Ptomey, the center’s executive director, said in introducing a panel Wednesday at the 2022 ULI Spring Meeting in San Diego. The panel, titled “Attainable Housing for All: Replicable Best Practices from Local Housing Challenges,” presented work at the district council level in Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

During the 2022 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference, a panel discussion on “Getting Residential to Net Zero” began with real estate professionals sharing profiles of net zero projects, followed by a passionate discussion on the urgency to get real estate to net zero.

At the 2019 ULI U.K. National Conference, a panel on the practicalities of real estate investment reflected on the opportunities and challenges, not least in terms of the impact that Brexit is having on investor sentiment, as well as where we are in the market cycle. Multifamily continues to do well, while retail is struggling as in overbuilt markets.

The growing popularity of online grocery shopping could result in demand for up to 35 million square feet (3.25 million sq m) of U.S. cold-storage space shifting from retail stores to warehouses and distribution centers within the next seven years, according to a report from CBRE.

At the 2018 ULI Europe Conference in Berlin, a number of discussions on the future of the retail business looked at the changing shopping center ecosystems and what developers could be doing better.