It’s tough to view a strong economy as bad news. Yet a firmly positive economic projection in ULI’s Real Estate Economic Forecast does not bode well for commercial real estate participants who are hoping for relief in rate cuts from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

What does it take to secure debt in today’s challenging commercial real estate environment? It all boils down to experience, relationships, and a lot of creativity. That’s according to an expert panel speaking this morning at ULI’s spring meeting at the New York Hilton Midtown. The panel is the first in a series of three, which will include Raising Equity (10 a.m. Wednesday) and Borrowers’ Experiences—Recent Success Stories (10 a.m. Thursday).

Since assuming office in 2018, Assessor Fritz Kaegi has overseen the assessment of all residential and commercial properties in Cook County, the region in northeastern Illinois that includes Chicago.

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.

A general session at the ULI Carolinas Meeting, moderated by Risa Wilkerson of Healthy Places by Design, showcased how the convergence of the built environment, health and equity forms a complex web that impacts every facet of human life. Dr. Malo Andrew Hutson, a distinguished academic at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, provided a deep dive into how residential segregation and the built environment contribute to health disparities.

How can academic institutions and private sector partners collaborate to spur development in a challenging economy?

After developer Bruce Etkin, a past ULI Trustee and a current member of the ULI Foundation board, sold all of his company’s properties in 2021, he channeled his energy and attention to different challenges—one of them homelessness.

Women in leadership roles was the theme of a discussion during the 2024 ULI Spring Meeting in New York City. Kelly Nagel, who was recently named Head of Residential at EDENS, an owner and operator of mixed-use properties nationwide, hosted a fireside chat with Nancy Lashine, founder and managing partner at Park Madison Partners, a New York-based boutique advisory and capital-raising firm.

In a general session at the 2024 ULI Spring Meeting, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke with Ralph Rosenberg, a partner and global head of real estate with KKR. Clinton, who now teaches at Columbia University, focused her remarks on what she said are the three major conflicts affecting the global economy.

Eight years ago, the landmark Paris Agreement kicked off a worldwide campaign to reduce carbon emissions. The targets set were big: slash emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and be net zero by 2050. So far, the world is not making enough progress on those lofty goals, and the progress that has been made has been very unevenly distributed. Experts from major real estate firms, including Boston Properties, CBRE, and Community Preservation Corporation, drove home the net zero transition’s importance during a panel discussion at the 2024 ULI Spring Meeting in New York City. They talked about the costs of getting to net zero, what lenders and owners are doing to get there, and the risk of not addressing climate change.

A new global report from ULI and LaSalle Investment Management (LaSalle), a leading real estate investment management firm, offers a new framework to help the real estate industry act on climate risk disclosure data. Across the real estate industry, practitioners understand physical climate risk to assets and portfolios poses a financial risk, but there are still many challenges to acting on the data being collected and disclosed.

Over the last decade, real estate leaders have started to wrap the industry’s arms around what climate change—and the energy transition associated with it—means for the industry. Real estate companies with net zero commitments now account for nearly $1 trillion in market capitalization—well over half of the market cap of all publicly traded REITs. But setting targets is just the start. We’re learning a lot from those leaders moving beyond commitments to the hard work of transforming physical assets.

Tattooed, tanned, and tousled, 48-year-old Stefan Quinn Soloviev looks like an athletic nerd who stepped out of a Mad Max film, but don’t let his appearance fool you. Soloviev is one of the largest landowners in the United States—number 21, according to Landreport.com—with a portfolio that includes some of Manhattan’s most coveted properties.

The natural reaction to hearing that a product or material has been made with the assistance of modern slavery is to flinch in horror and perhaps disbelief. Unfortunately, the construction industry is ranked second—just behind domestic service—as a problematic industry in terms of its risk of relying on forced labor, according to the 2022 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, Forced Labour and Forced Marriage report from the International Labour Organization in Geneva.

Urban Land is spotlighting some trailblazing women in commercial real estate, all of whom are members of the ULI Women’s Leadership Initiative. Emma West, partner at Toronto-based Bousfields Inc., says it was the women who were part of the WLI Toronto Committee when she first joined who were instrumental in her professional development.