The Real Finds Podcast, Episode 94: Density or Growth, Building a $400M Small Bay Industrial Portfolio With Frank Forte
A conversation between Gordon Lamphere, J.D. of Van Vlissingen and Co. and Frank Forte, founder and chief investment officer at Lucerne Capital Partners. Transcript edited for clarity.
Frank Forte: People just generally need to understand that this is an operations-based business, and knowing how to solve a problem when it happens isn’t about being the smartest person. It’s about either having been there or knowing where to go to get the answer. And if you don’t have either of those things, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Gordon Lamphere: I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to the Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast we’ll be speaking with Frank Forte, founder and chief investment officer at Lucerne Capital Partners. Founded in 2016, Lucerne specializes in opportunistic investments in light industrial, small bay, and mixed-use assets, deploying over four hundred million dollars across high-growth and dense East Coast markets. On the podcast, we dive into Frank’s path from the financial crisis to private equity to going out on his own, why he pivoted from multifamily to small bay industrial, and the strategy behind their success. Frank goes into what he’s seeing in the market today, so if you’re an investor looking to deploy capital, today’s podcast and playbook is well worth a listen. Frank, thank you so much for hopping on today.
Frank Forte: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Gordon Lamphere: So what got you into the world of real estate?
Frank Forte: My journey started about fifteen years ago. I came out of school in the financial crisis. I always wanted to go to Wall Street, do some sort of trading, options, commodities; I always had a high math aptitude, so I wanted to do something fast-paced. I liked the idea that it was winner-take-all, no splitting the difference, you win or lose. Unfortunately the world blew up. My second love was always real estate. I loved it as a child, read all sorts of books on it, and always figured I’d make money doing something else and then do real estate later in life. So I got a job as a consultant for the Treasury, basically mopping up after all these banks that had failed. I was there a couple of years. The prestige was cool, visiting the Treasury, all this cool stuff, but the pay was horrendous, as you might imagine.
I ended up saying, I’d really like to get closer to real estate. So I got a job at a senior housing debt and equity fund buying and selling senior housing facilities, Alzheimer’s, dementia, skilled nursing, the whole thing, some drug and alcohol rehab. It was kind of private capital because they had a debt and an equity arm. Back then, senior housing, we were doing loans at eighteen percent on mezzanine A and B pieces because the space was so fragmented. I had a sticky note on my computer with all the different modalities of care and the cap rates, and back then Alzheimer’s was a thirteen. Could you imagine? Now obviously it’s an operating business wrapped in a real estate wrapper, we all know this. After that I had a job with a Fortress and CW Capital drop-down that they were very cagey about when I interviewed. It turned out to be the largest commercial real estate default in history, still is, the Peter Cooper Village Stuyvesant Town deal, if you’ve ever read the book “Other People’s Money.” I was part of a small team, we turned it around and ended up selling it to Blackstone. Sadly I was an analyst at the time, so I got a bonus I thought was really good but turned out not to be so good down the line. But it was a great run.
I continued to get closer to real estate, spent some time in banking, and ultimately decided to go out on my own about a decade ago. I was twenty-seven at the time, so I’m thirty-seven now. I figured the only people I saw making more money than the bankers and the PE guys were the ones who truly owned it, being your own principal as opposed to working for someone else. So I went out on my own, never looked back. We’ve done about four hundred million of volume during that time, raised probably about a hundred million of equity, which has been great. That’s the cliff notes version.
Gordon Lamphere: When you got into real estate on your own and deploying capital, how did you choose a location to focus on, or an asset class, and what was that process like?
Frank Forte: Great question. My last stop before going out on my own, I was a banker for a company called Berkadia. We were a small team, about ten people, doing about two billion a year of capital placement, debt and equity. Some we were true bankers, balance sheet money or agency money where we retain a risk portion; some was brokerage, some was equity placement. So we did an extreme amount of deals, saw the whole country, different sizes, different sponsors, operational differences between these guys. This was before multifamily was the soup du jour, so 2013, 2014. I saw a lot of guys going south into the Carolinas, buying these things for nothing, thirty, forty grand a unit, dirt cheap. At the time, coming from New Jersey, New Jersey multi was a hundred to a hundred and twenty a door, God only knows where it is now. So we invested up and down the East Coast with multi, started in New Jersey and Philadelphia because we were driving distance, and started in the Carolinas in Charlotte. We’d gotten involved with a gentleman where the business relationship didn’t work out, but he had the construction know-how and we knew the market dynamics, so we opened up that market, which we’re still in today. We divested all our apartment stuff; we have one legacy deal remaining that my partners and I own with no investors, and when the market comes back we’ll get rid of it.
Three or four years ago, which is really why you and I are on, we said, multi is hitting the skids and hitting it hard. I’d seen it as a banker years ago in Houston, where guys were giving away three, four months free because they were building indiscriminately. In Houston there’s no zoning, so you’ve got a funeral parlor next to a strip club next to a person’s house next to an auto body shop next to a florist. It’s crazy. So we saw it coming, divested a lot of our stuff, did really well on most of the deals, got kicked a little on a couple at the end, such is real estate and life. We said, what asset class can we get into that replicates a lot of what our investors came to love about apartments, quick mark-to-market, diversity of cash flow, and we thought hard to build, which we found out wasn’t quite true. We’d always dabbled in industrial on the side but never had the bandwidth because we were so hyper-focused on multi.
We ended up taking our own money and doing seven, eight months of research in Charlotte, a market we’d been in six or seven years. We took a step back, pretended we were from Mars, looked at the asset class, and figured it out. We bought a deal for a buck seventeen a foot, fifty thousand feet, forty tenants. Roll-up doors, they all had bathrooms, a man door, really nice product. We took the rents over three years from six dollars net equivalent, which was like nine gross, and at the end we were top-ticking it at twenty a foot net. We smashed it out of the park. As we started to do well, managing it ourselves, we said, let’s buy more of this. So that kicked off our journey into industrial. We’ve had multiple round trips, we’re going to have another one soon, and we bought two deals already this quarter, closing on a third in a week and a half.
Gordon Lamphere: So you talked about checking boxes. What are those boxes you’re looking to check when thinking about deploying capital?
Frank Forte: A couple of things. One, we’re a value-driven platform. We’re not buying coupon clippers. An upper-single-digit cash yield is great, but I’ll get there with value; I don’t need to get there and do nothing. When you go to your investors, you have to have a value prop. On average, our industrial investments have generated north of a thirty IRR. Will that go on forever? Probably not. But we go in, we work it, we do the renewals ourselves, we identify stuff, a lot of it off market. Two of the deals we bought this quarter I’ve been chasing for over a year; one that’s closing in two weeks I’ve been chasing for two years, totally off market. The owners are transitioning to mostly an IOS-driven platform. They have a lot of older multi-tenant and just don’t have the management bandwidth to handle it. It’s about a 75,000-foot building, nineteen or twenty tenants.
Our value is that we control the asset, we do asset management, property management, construction management, and sourcing. I’m never going to jam a bad deal down our investors’ throat that I bid on market with ten other guys bidding it to the moon. Most of what we buy is truly off market. There are all these people coming into this space who think real estate’s passive, which is the biggest joke in history. Real estate is an operating business; it’s ten percent to buy, ten percent to sell, and eighty percent, the middle of the sandwich, is the ops, and the ops is where you make all the money. We have a ten-year track record of high, market-beating returns. We generally underwrite a base case of a fourteen to sixteen compounded net to the investor, and most returns are considerably north of that. Our value is that we go in and do the stuff other people can’t or don’t understand. I’ve personally GC’d probably twenty-five million dollars of projects over the years, from crazy gut renovations and conversions to little knick-knacky paint jobs. No one wants to do it and they don’t understand how. If you go to a management company they’ll charge you ten percent for the privilege, so we do it for our investors essentially for free as part of what we do. The guys we sell to are often a couple of legs down the trough, scared of construction, don’t want to do it, don’t understand how to cost it. So we move the rents up a good bit but leave some delta, do all the heavy lifting, and package it up and sell it as a portfolio-plus to people just getting into this phase who want a lift on the rents but don’t know how to do all that stuff.
That value-add small bay thesis, buy the off-market messy multi-tenant deal, do the construction others won’t, and sell into a compressed cap, is the mirror image of the tenant-side small bay dynamics Kurt and Stewart Jensen described from Kansas City in How Regional Brokers Beat the National Flags.
Gordon Lamphere: When you talk about profiles and markets, what’s your tenant profile? What tenants are you trying to attract?
Frank Forte: It’s the craziest thing, and I try to explain this to people. You can get the tenant paying two grand a month in a small suite, and the guy makes ten or twelve thousand a month, and that guy’s going to pay every time, because that business means everything to him. Then I have an auto body guy in about 4,400 square feet who does 180 grand a month in revenue. He just put a fifty-thousand-dollar dry-vac paint booth in, so pristine you could eat off the floors. He’s built up all the connections, Progressive, Geico, Allstate, gets all his insurance work, and he’s probably clearing twenty-five to thirty-five grand a month net after everything. So you have a wide variety. We have a lot of tradesmen. One of our sayings is that small bay, contractor, multi-tenant, whatever you want to call it, follows the rooftops to all service-based businesses. Rarely do you have a guy in three or four thousand square feet shipping across the country. We’ve got some small e-commerce, eBay sellers, but generally they’re auto guys, plumbers, HVAC, painters, guys doing high-end car work for clients with McLarens, ultra-high-margin business. I had a guy who made silicone mats you put under a stove, like a WeatherTech mat for your stove, thousands of them stacked to the ceiling in two thousand feet.
The profile is generally mom and pop, but once in a while we get a good national tenant. I have Shaw Floors, probably my biggest tenant; it’s the only location in the entire world that they don’t own. We own a building in Mooresville, North Carolina, near the corporate headquarters of Lowe’s, so a lot of Lowe’s vendors co-locate and set up planograms, mock aisles that look like you’re in Lowe’s, to walk executives through new products. I have a tenant out of Florida called MasTech, a forty-billion-dollar company; one small vertical does line work for power companies like Duke Energy, the largest electrical company in the US, headquartered in Charlotte. When the lines go down, MasTech does all the line work, so on our lot in the back, a point-seven-acre lot we leveled and fenced, all the cherry pickers are there, and they took four thousand feet as their office and command center. And that guy is next to a guy who makes twelve grand a month. That’s what we love about the space, it’s universal. We try to look for tenants who can cover the rent usually ten times over, but I give a lot of people shots at half of that, because small business needs a place to go. When you see a guy you gave a shot to killing it two years later, what’s better than that? That’s by far the most rewarding thing to me.
Gordon Lamphere: We have countless stories like that. There’s one group we worked with that started off in three hundred feet, and when they got bought by private equity they were in like forty-eight thousand feet. To change the trajectory of someone’s life and their family by giving them a shot, no credit when they started, but a really good business plan and we took a risk.
Frank Forte: And how badly do you get burned on three hundred feet? And how easily can you re-tenant it? That’s the other piece.
Gordon Lamphere: One thing we see constantly with investors is they’re worried about getting burned, and one big worry, you turn on certain broadcasts and it seems like blue states are just a dumpster fire of economics. For multifamily there’s some truth to that. For industrial and retail and a wide range of other asset classes, is that true? How did that play into your thesis, and how do you look at value in blue states versus growth states, since you have a mix?
Frank Forte: I have an interesting theory that would need a whole other podcast, but the crux is that all the states are eventually going the way of the blue states, and I don’t necessarily mean politically. Who are the blue states? It’s where you are, Illinois, California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, usually the coastal states, usually the states that are much more mature, been around longer, and structurally have higher taxes because they have higher deficits and higher problems. Where I’m going is that I think we’re all headed there. When I was a kid, the first president I remember was George Bush’s first term, and back then the deficit was three, three and a half trillion, and everyone was outraged. Now we’re at thirty-eight, and with the conflict in Iran and everything else, we’re going to be at forty. It’s just going to happen.
I think eventually, forget whether a state ends up Democrat or Republican, all the states go to this place where we have deficits, and that’s more an inevitability based on the country itself than how it’s managed. Blue states with horrible deficits, partly it’s how they’ve been managed, but partly they’re just more mature. North Carolina only got their first toll road last year; you could drive the whole state, beautiful six-lane roads, pay nothing. So it’s not that North Carolina or Florida are permanently amazing and investable; it’s that they’re thirty, forty, fifty years behind these other pockets, and there’s a window of time where you have this growth. All things come to an end, like Microsoft. In the nineties Microsoft was a huge growth company; for the last twenty years it’s been a mature blue-chip. Growth can’t go up and to the right forever.
So my point is you have to look at blue states as having more security and less volatility, in my opinion. People need to be by job centers. The people in these mature, high-cost areas generally have higher income, they’re more durable, and they’re used to living under a high-tax regime, so they’ve adapted. Another of our sayings is that entrepreneurs are just survivors; the longer you’ve survived, the higher your probability of not crapping out. My tenants in Maryland don’t even blink when I tell them it’s sixteen bucks a foot net plus five at twenty-one carry; some in Rockville closer to DC are paying almost thirty all in, because there’s nowhere to go. That same business replacing an HVAC unit in a house in Chevy Chase or Bethesda is charging ten or twelve grand, versus North Carolina where they charge seventy-five hundred. The guy in Chevy Chase is a lobbyist ripping a million or two a year; different from the person in North Carolina who does manufacturing and makes eighty.
So it’s about the market, about density, and about being by population centers. If you can wrangle deals in truly infill population centers, you theoretically have a very long-term covered land play in the back of your head, even though I’d never underwrite it that way, and you’re always going to have density. Nine point nine million people live between Baltimore and DC. When they said everyone moved out of DC, it was forty-four thousand people, a rounding error. I still have the other 9.8 million to service these buildings. So it’s about location, picking these spots based on density or a path of growth, and protecting your moat. In small bay, the moat is that it’s hard to build, places don’t want it, and it’s expensive because you’re building multiple units, multiple HVAC, multiple bathrooms. But you have to expect that at some point all good things come to an end, and the question is where in that curve you grab your investment.
Frank’s density-or-growth framing, and his point that small bay is hard and expensive to build, which protects existing owners, tracks closely with the supply-constraint case Chad Griffiths made for industrial in Commercial Real Estate Doomers, Gurus, And Industrial Opportunity.
Gordon Lamphere: Talking about the curve and the moat and construction, one thing you’ve done a lot is going in and fixing up buildings. Where’s your limit for fixing up buildings? It’s great to put on a new roof or fix a parking lot or add HVAC and turn a deal, but often it requires more. Where’s your limit, and would you even consider something as crazy as ground-up construction?
Frank Forte: We did one ground-up deal years ago in COVID, before the market ripped. It was a metal building, new construction, beautiful, you can see it on our website. The land basis was dirt low; the guy had lost his legs to diabetes, crazy story, had done half the site work, and we bought the land with half the site work done at a basis of about a third of unentitled land in New Jersey. The land is basically where the margin was. Build cost was sub a hundred a foot hard cost; today that’s much greater. You always look at below replacement cost, the most overused term in real estate, the rallying cry of every broker, and eight out of ten of them have no idea what replacement cost truly is. If you build that same metal multi-tenant building today in New Jersey, first off you can’t even find the land unless it was previously industrial. Hard cost is like a buck forty, a buck fifty a foot, land is fifty to sixty unentitled if you can find it, plus soft costs and carry, so you’re into it like two-twenty, two-thirty a foot for metal, twenty-five, thirty bucks north of that for tilt-up. You have to get rents of eighteen or north to build to an eight yield on cost, and then it becomes a sizing question, small enough that someone can afford it but not so big you can’t fill it.
Let’s talk about DC. A deal we bought there about a year and a half ago, we bought for low nine million, a buck fifty-five a foot, and got a new roof out of the seller; the land upgrades alone go for six million. It’s in a high-traffic retail corridor on Route One, the longest north-south highway in America, called Baltimore Avenue in that area, an intense retail corridor with the Laurel Mall directly across the street. It’s an industrial property, but its highest and best use, if it ever became obsolete, which it won’t, would be retail, and rents in that corridor are thirty-five, forty a foot. Forty a foot at a six cap is six hundred, six fifty a foot. Retail construction is about three hundred a foot with a gen-one TI package, so you could pay a hundred a foot for that land and still build. We have five acres there. When you segment it out, we’re basically buying the bricks and sticks, sixty thousand feet, eighteen-foot block with a new roof, for fifty a foot. That’s a really interesting way to look at it, a sum of the parts, because land is land, they’re not making any more of it, but construction costs oscillate.
So how much capex is too much? It’s a function of where you can take the rents and where you can move product. The deal we’re closing in a few weeks outside DC, in Prince George’s County, which wraps around the bottom of DC like a diamond, the rents are low, about a twelve-dollar market. You get a lot of spillover from Northern Virginia where rents are bananas, below twenties a foot if you can find it and it hasn’t been chopped up for a data center. We’re buying at 107 a foot, putting ten bucks a foot in plus another two or three of frictional cost, so worst case a buck twenty-five a foot all in. We think it’s worth 157 in our model, possibly 165, 170. It’s cash-flowing at about a seven cap going in. That’s a deal we’ll do. Contrast that with putting in seven-fifty a foot of capex on something fifty percent vacant at 107 a foot; probably not good enough, because of the leasing cost, downtime, and burn on your interest, and now you’re one hundred percent going bridge loan, which is still every bit of eight percent on a five-to-six-million-dollar loan. The toughest thing nowadays, because this space has gotten hotter, is people constantly trying to get you to pay up for work and leasing you haven’t done yet. They say pay a five-and-a-half cap; no, it’s a seven-cap world minimum. New investors don’t understand: it’s really a yield on cost, not a cap rate, and you have to grow a hundred and fifty basis points out of that compression before you’re at par. Those first three, four, five tenants you turn, that’s just to get your head above water.
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s talk about how AI is changing the business, because I know you’ve been using it. What are you seeing?
Frank Forte: I used to pay attorneys ten or fifteen grand on top of legal to do lease abstracts, because a paralegal would do it, and on a multi-tenant building with twenty tenants it’s really in-depth, all these extensions and renewal options. I put it in Gemini now, or ChatGPT, or something called Madness, which is agentic. Twenty minutes, it runs in the background, I go to lunch, come back, it’s done, and someone from our team checks it. I told a young guy who works here, whom I’m fond of and who does a damn good job, you’re so lucky you’re in your mid-twenties, but you’re also lucky that time wasn’t now, because kids send us resumes every week. I got on the phone with one recently, three-point GPA, went to Purdue, great resume, and I said, listen, I’m sure you’re great, but you need to bring real value. It’s not that you don’t have the intelligence. All the value creation used to be doing the grunt work; that was the quid pro quo, I do the grunt work for you, Mr. Senior Banker, and you teach me everything. I don’t need the ferret now. So if I don’t need the ferret, how do these guys get deal reps? They’re not going to, if they’re not shadowing this, but I don’t need to pay an extreme amount for an analyst to do work I pay forty dollars a month for software to do.
Gordon Lamphere: The big issue for our industry long term is that the back-office folks who learn deals through synthesis over a five-year span, those people aren’t going to exist anymore. We have early-stage opportunities for people in construction, GCing on site, property management on site, or brokers who are runners going out doing showings and understanding buildings in person. But for back-office deal stuff, I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of opportunity going forward, so it’ll be interesting forty years from now how any of those people move up the career ladder.
Frank Forte: The advice I gave that kid, and maybe advice you could give if people reach out to you, is: I’m in my late thirties and I don’t even understand a ton of this stuff, it’s like another language. You could be really valuable if, instead of saying you’ll add value on the deal side, you come in knowing how to prompt this stuff and build these workflows, so I don’t have to pay someone outside. Show me what I don’t know. You’re twenty-one, show me what I have no clue about. That’s the new trade-off in my opinion: come in, harness this tech, and then I’ll teach you about deals.
Gordon Lamphere: What’s wild is I know you guys are using it, but there are so many shops we work with on the management and brokerage side that aren’t yet. They’re still doing manual tasks, and these are large funds, not mom-and-pop shops.
Frank Forte: I think it’s the anchoring of that mentality where they want the whole bullpen of people, so if some managing director wants to demand something gets done, he can call a young kid in and say, the fonts are off, redo this. I think on the multi-tenant side you don’t see as much disruption. We own some retail too, and I always say retail, AI can’t make me Chinese food, can’t make me pizza, can’t teach my kid karate, yet, at least. The bigger-box stuff is scary, because the goalpost keeps moving on what’s functionally obsolete. When I started, it was twenty-eight clear, then thirty-two, then thirty-six, now forty, and now in some inner-city areas they have multi-tenant set up for robots. That space is scary because it’s overbuilt, but also because every time someone pushes the envelope with a new innovation that makes the cubic utilization better, the other buildings become inferior. With small and shallow bay, they like sixteen clear, eighteen clear; those businesses are never going to need that advanced space. So in a perverse way, it’s older and theoretically functionally obsolete compared to brand-new stuff, but compared to itself, nothing’s ever changed. That’s another reason we really like it. I’m hard-pressed to see people not needing two thousand feet with a roll-up door and a bathroom to do whatever they’re doing.
Gordon Lamphere: Speaking of things never changing, let’s go back in time to when you were leaving college. If there was one bit of advice, what would it be?
Frank Forte: A couple of nuggets. First, you’ve got to do what you love. I love what I do: business, real estate, math, deals, negotiating. I’m naturally a pretty aggressive person, so it fits my personality. If you don’t love it, you’re going to be miserable, and the likelihood of getting ahead is low because you’re in your own head and can’t get out of your own way. Second, you don’t always have to take the highest-paying job out of school. When I got out, everyone wanted an investment banking job, do two years, get an MBA, go to PE. I had an unusual path, but I always worked my tail off, asked the right questions, became indispensable. I worked six days a week, eighty to a hundred hours a week forever, and the only difference when I started my business was I was doing it for myself. Hard work is the key to unlocking all of it. Networking is super important, you never know who you’ll meet, take every meeting, but hard work ultimately wins the day. You could know everyone, but if you don’t know how to work hard, you won’t get to the level you want. And it doesn’t matter as much where you go to school; you get that first job and it becomes irrelevant, it flips from school to experience. Add value to someone’s life who’s ahead of you, make their life easier, and they’ll teach you in exchange. Labor is the greatest leverage in the world. If you’re spending time on something that isn’t valuable to you, find someone downstream who’ll happily take it because they want to get where you are, and it cascades.
Gordon Lamphere: Last question, the whole reason for the podcast: who should be the next person that hops on?
Frank Forte: I have a good friend, Guy, an IOS broker. He started in multi many years ago, super scrappy guy from New York, a tell-it-how-it-is guy like me. He’s sold property across the country and built an incredible brokerage that’s essentially a one-man shop with outsourced support staff. He’s figured out how to be really lean, make really good money, still source really good deals, and he’s beaten out a lot of the larger brokerages selling this product. If we look at an IOS deal, which is rare for us but sometimes has a component, I’ll call him and he’ll say seven hundred thousand per acre, not a penny more. He knows all the markets for IOS the way we are in small bay. Great guy, I’d love to see him on.
Guy’s IOS specialization is exactly the terrain Ron Rohde walked us through from the Texas side in his industrial outdoor storage deep dive on the Real Finds Podcast.
Gordon Lamphere: We’d love to connect. If somebody wants to connect with you, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Frank Forte: Frank.forte at lucernecapital.com, or go to lucernecapital.com and reach out, or on LinkedIn. We have a good presence online, not the guru-podcast presence, a real presence. Always welcome a conversation.
Gordon Lamphere: Frank, thank you so very much. We have to have you on in the future.
Frank Forte: Yeah, thank you so much, Gordon. It’s been wonderful.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Frank. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, subscriptions, and interactions truly matter and help us continue to get quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere for the Real Finds Podcast, and thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in small bay, light industrial, or mixed-use property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q2 2026.