What does it take to nurture and grow a private, non-family commercial real estate development company? Brian Coulter, managing partner at The JBG Companies, a prominent investor, owner, developer and manager of real estate properties in the Washington, D.C, metropolitan area, described how his firm handles these challenges, at NAIOP’s Development '13 conference.

Through the rearview mirror of 2013, the demographic preferences that are shaping real estate’s future are coming into clear view: The emerging millennial generation is creating a strong “back to the city” movement, with the baby boomer generation as its partner.

After reading the 2014 Spring issue’s cover story on changing corporate environments, we were inspired to ask whether the nation’s largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) have experienced significant changes in their working-age populations. The map and table shows what we found.

From a geographical and infrastructure perspective, Chicago is the foremost transportation/logistics hub in the country. But the city’s leaders, from Mayor Rahm Emanuel on down, do not like to take anything for granted, so they have formed a new group called Supply Chain Innovation Network of Chicago to help the city and surrounding areas maintain and grow their logistics position.

Downtown traffic congestion is reaching serious levels in most major cities, but technology and smartphone apps are coming to the rescue — and just might make dramatic impacts on traffic volume and how we hunt for parking spaces. A case in point is the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which just completed and is evaluating the results of a pilot study, the SFpark program.

Historically, state and local taxes on commercial real estate developments and their managers and investors have been fairly straightforward. Obviously, real property taxes and, in some cases, personal property taxes applied to these projects. Property managers rarely considered sales and use taxes, since real estate construction and related services usually were not taxable.