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Industry leaders speaking at the recent ULI Asia Pacific Summit said that green financing and new building materials are helping them make their developments more sustainable without hurting their bottom line.

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.

A new ULI report says that setting up a publicly/privately owned development company will be crucial to unlocking the regeneration of Haven-Stad, which sits close to the city center of Amsterdam and is set to become one of Europe’s largest inner-city mixed-use residential districts. The city hopes to achieve a new mixed-use, dense, and sustainable urban district with 70,000 homes and 58,000 jobs across 12 sub-areas. On completion, Haven-Stad will be comparable to other medium-sized cities in the Netherlands.

“There is great confusion about what the future will be,” legendary architect Jan Gehl said at ULI Europe’s Real Estate Forum in Copenhagen in June.

At the 2019 ULI Florida Summit, futurist Greg Lindsay, a futurist and senior fellow with the NewCities nonprofit organization, detailed change agents of future development including the electric scooter mania, shops without checkouts, and “urban cabins.” Lindsay described broadly how the disruption of retail, office, residential, and transportation will continue around the globe—and, in some cases, increase.

The city of Detroit used an online platform to get more community feedback on the city’s first Sustainability Action Agenda. In addition to traditional community outreach, community members were solicited with a multilingual campaign using text messages, a web platform, and traditional yard signs, helping the city gather input from thousands of respondents, more than would be possible at a traditional community meeting.

In many American downtown areas and commercial centers, improvement districts are used as tools for revitalization, placemaking, and economic development. They improve the street presence and provide important marketing services for local businesses. But what if they could tackle larger infrastructure needs? Better yet, what if commercial real estate owners and investors could attract billions of public dollars and, in the process, create a new way to build roads, interchanges, and other important projects?

Interest rates have been on a roller-coaster ride over the last year, but cap rates are largely unchanged. The result of these moves is that cap rate spreads relative to the safe investments in the 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds have moved back to the levels seen in 2017. Given everything that has changed over the last year—as well as everything that has not—there may be room for cap rate spreads to move lower.

Tightening availability of tech talent in leading markets has spurred hiring momentum in smaller and upstart markets in the United States and Canada—such as Tucson, Arizona, and Waterloo, Ontario—as expanding tech employers seek additional labor pools, according to CBRE’s annual Scoring Tech Talentreport.

Transportation demand management policies that require access to travel options as part of the development process can be highly effective in the creation of communities that provide mixed-use, higher-density development without increasing traffic congestion, according to a new ULI publication.