Inside Edge on Assignment With ULI Chicago: Emerging Trends in Real Estate for 2011

A black cat puts the hex on the Cubbies.

Will the Chicago Cubs ever win another World Series? Who was the genius who decided that there should be a “p” in “raspberry”? And just what are the emerging trends in real estate for 2011?

While I can’t answer the first two questions with any level of confidence, I can at least point you in one direction on the last of those queries.

For the third year in a row, I recently had the opportunity to write the summary of the Urban Land Institute’s Chicago District Council panel discussion on the upcoming year’s emerging trends.

There were a few hundred people in the Hyatt Regency Hotel ballroom, so odds are you weren’t able to be on hand. That’s OK, you can still read the Emerging Trends summary here.

Writing On `State of the Chicago Hotel Market'

It's been awhile since I wrote about hotels.

I've written about events at hotels, provided feature reporting for Time magazine on boutique hotels--and even went into one hotel room, right after a police officer, to report on a young man who had fallen to his death from a ledge.

But it wasn't until 10 days ago that I wrote about the hotel industry as a whole. It came in the form of a summary report of "The State of the Chicago Hotel Market and Its Reflection of Economic Conditions," at an Urban Land Institute meeting.

The speakers I chronicled offered a good news/bad news report--with the good news coming only after some immediate-term bad news the industry is grappling with.

Fittingly enough, the session was at a swanky hotel known as theWit in downtown Chicago. Previous ULI summaries I've done are linked from a prior Inside Edge PR blog post.

ULI Update: Writing About the Future of Retail

A year ago, I began writing summaries of panel discussions of the Urban Land Institute's Chicago chapter. Two days ago, after a summer hiatus, the ULI resumed those meetings with "The Future of U.S. Retail-How a Changed Consumer Will Affect Retail Real Estate."

As usual, the speakers were brimming with insight, which I did my best to encapsulate, complete with Mick Jagger lyrics, in this written summary, which appears on the ULI-Chicago website.

Of the numerous data points divulged on Wednesday at the Union League Club in downtown Chicago, here's the one I found most intriguing: the year when the United States is projected to be its "oldest" is 2037. God willing, I'll be turning 69 that year, doing my part to justify that collective elder-statesman distinction.

You can also read prior Inside Edge PR blog posts about ULI topics I've covered, from talks the organization held last November, as well as in January, in March, and in May.