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
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.
Since Airbnb began to disrupt the U.S. hospitality sector, industry leaders have been thinking about ways to attract previously underserved customers. A number of recently built hotels and resorts combine the space and amenities of a private home with high-end amenities, concierge service, and curated experiences. A 2017 ULI Fall Meeting session presented two recently introduced concepts with distinctly different target markets and price points.
After years of steady growth, the hotel industry is bracing for a tough year. “Growth and revenue are slowing down,” Bruce Baltin, managing director of CBRE Hotels, told executives and experts gathered for ULI’s “Hotel and Resort Development: Next Wave of Innovation” conference in La Costa, California, held in June. “It’s hit a peak. We think we’re at a plateau.”
Industrial
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.”
This year, global investors should be keeping an eye on politics in China, Japan’s outbound investment, and the logistics sector, said a panel of senior industry figures speaking at the recent ULI Asia Pacific Summit 2017.
Mixed-Use
The winners of the second ULI Hines Student Competition for the Asia Pacific region faced a dual challenge: create a compelling urban development proposal and follow in the footsteps of classmates who won the inaugural contest.
A close look at trends shaping today’s best economic and talent hubs that offers valuable clues into how to create equitable, sustainable innovation districts that prosper.
As cities confront the housing crisis, they face intersecting challenges: opposition not only to affordable-housing development but often to any development; spiraling financing and construction costs; outdated zoning that stifles or misplaces growth; egregious bureaucratic barriers; and issues around displacement and historic preservation. But some cities have an asset that can serve as a testing ground for harmonizing urgent priorities: their downtown districts.
Multifamily
A panel of sustainability experts recently gathered at the 2025 ULI Resilience Summit in Denver to discuss how the insurability of affordable housing can be greatly enhanced by using resilient construction.
As it contends with the same post-pandemic challenges that confront other urban cores nationwide, downtown Denver is leveraging public/private partnerships to bring back vitality. At the ULI 2025 Spring Meeting in Denver, Colorado, five leaders involved with the city’s revitalization shared recent successes and plans for Denver’s future.
ULI has launched C Change for Housing, a major new pan-European program designed to mobilize the real estate industry around two of society’s most urgent and interconnected challenges: the climate crisis and housing affordability.
Office
AI, redefining what is possible
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.
Residental
Michael Spotts, a senior visiting research fellow at ULI’s Terwiliger Center for Housing and head of Neighborhood Fundamentals, recently appeared on the Talking Headways podcast. Spotts chats with us about takeaways from the Shaw Symposium on Urban Community Issues, the definition of infrastructure, and the importance of taking a systems approach to important interconnected topics like transportation, education, and health care.
The multifamily sector is successfully weathering the pandemic and construction continues to boom, leading the commercial real estate industry’s overall recovery. But development doesn’t appear even across multifamily market segments.
A Utah developer includes townhouses to densify one block in the downtown of a new community southwest of Salt Lake City.
Retail
Singapore-based developer CapitaLand is harvesting data to boost the revenues of its retail tenants and to help it locate future malls. Speaking at the ULI Asia Pacific Convivium, Chris Chong, managing director at CapitaLand Retail, said that the company uses data to boost both footfall and spending for tenants in its malls, which will ultimately benefit the landlord.
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.