Property Types
Hotels and Resorts
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.
Imagine arriving home after a long day at the office and calling room service to have a chef-prepared meal delivered to your door. For residents of Nashville’s new, innovatively designed Aertson Midtown building, that is not wishful thinking. They simply place an order with the signature restaurant of the Kimpton hotel that shares their apartment building.
Set against an urban landscape of concrete, steel, and glass in Tanjong Pagar, Singapore’s central business district, Oasia Hotel Downtown (OHD) stands out with its red silhouette clad in lush greenery. An integrated hotel/office development comprising a 27-story, 314-room business hotel and 100 new-age offices, OHD responds to the government’s vision for the precinct earmarked as the island’s next waterfront city with a mix of business, commercial, and residential activities.
Industrial
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.
A year after the opening of the Panama Canal expansion, rents for industrial space around the Port of Los Angeles are at an all-time high and vacancy rates are hovering around 1 percent.
For more than 20 million passengers annually, Tegel Airport is the gateway to Berlin. As a new international airport is being built, an ambitious project is intended to transform Tegel into an “urban tech republic.”
Mixed-Use
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 communities and cities across the country face mounting land use and environmental challenges, Hilco Redevelopment Partners (HRP) and Melissa Schrock, HRP’s executive vice president of mixed-use development, are working to ensure urban redevelopment is a force for positive change.
Multifamily
In the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, two not-for-profit organizations—Fresh Hope Communities, the public benevolent institution entity of churches of Christ in NSW and ACT, and Nightingale Housing of Brunswick, Victoria—came together to develop a building that contains 54 units renting at 80 percent of market rates as well as two community-focused commercial spaces. The Churches of Christ Property Trust has provided a 99 year lease for the land, which allows the units to remain affordable far beyond a more typical 10-year period.
On January 7, 2025, when sparks began igniting the communities of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Pasadena, Altadena, Hollywood, and others, the city of Los Angeles had been struggling to produce 486,379 new housing units by 2029, a number mandated by California’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) to address the shortfall.
Climate considerations have increasingly become a critical focus for real estate owners, operators, and investors over the past few decades, particularly as the frequency of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters has surged. Beyond the headline-grabbing events, more frequent temperature extremes and less stable energy costs have real financial implications for owners and residents. Key changes in our operating environment include:
Office
How seven U.S. cities are tackling the future of downtowns
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.
This year’s Net Zero Buildings Week is Sept. 16-20. The virtual event series supports partnerships and collaboration across the built environment industry to collectively advance net zero buildings.
Residental
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.
ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT:In the past year, while investors have been eager to pour capital into the burgeoning build-to-rent (BRT) single-family residence market, in many cases they are finding plenty of roadblocks to profit, said panelists at the 2021 ULI Fall Meeting. Development sites are harder to find, the price of new construction has soared, and builders are finding they can make more money selling homes to buyers.
Retail
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.
A new report from CBRE highlights that the two categories occupying the most space in U.S. malls—department stores at 48.7 percent of gross leasable area, and apparel, accessories, and shoes at 29.4 percent—also posted relatively tepid retail-sales growth from 2011 to 2016. In contrast, categories with stronger retail-sales growth, such as health care, still account for relatively little occupancy of U.S. malls
In addition to Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, an enormous amount of movement has occurred in the grocery sector in the past year, as regional chains expand into new markets and European brands enter the United States.