Welcome To The Real Finds Blog: Commercial Real Estate Insights for Chicago and the Midwest
Welcome to The Real Finds Blog, your daily briefing on commercial real estate trends across Chicagoland and the Midwest. Published by Gordon Lamphere, a fourth-generation commercial real estate broker at Van Vlissingen & Co., this blog delivers sharp, actionable insights for CRE professionals navigating a changing market. Every article connects macro trends—interest rates, automation, supply chains, policy shifts—to local real estate strategy across high-demand submarkets, including:
- Downtown Chicago – office space, adaptive reuse, capital markets
- Elk Grove & O’Hare – industrial leasing, logistics infrastructure
- Kenosha & SE Wisconsin – warehouse development and distribution hubs
- Oak Brook & Schaumburg – suburban office leasing and reinvestment
- Naperville & the I-88 Corridor – flex space, R&D, life sciences
- Bolingbrook & the I-55 Corridor – fulfillment centers and industrial site selection
- Lake, DuPage, Will, Kane, and McHenry Counties – land use, entitlements, development opportunities, and tenant migration
From daily blog posts to in-depth strategy guides and transcribed podcast interviews, Real Finds turns global uncertainty into hyper-local market intelligence for investors, landlords, tenants, developers, and brokers New posts are published every weekday.
Should I Make My Office Building Pet Friendly?
Pet Friendly Offices: The Cheapest Amenity Chicagoland Landlords Keep Ignoring Landlords will spend seven figures on a lobby renovation before...
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Are Office Employees The New Consumers?
The Modern Office As Experiential And Hospitality Space The return-to-office debate was never really about mandates. It was about the...
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The Retail Tenants That Actually Pay: The 5 Best Tenants For Shopping Center Owners
The tenants landlords brag about, and those that actually make money for retail property owners, are two entirely different lists....
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Empty Cribs, Empty Pocketbooks: Real Estate’s Demographic Dilemma
Commercial real estate investment has traditionally thrived on location, development, and population growth. The sector, an integral part of the...
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Why Everything You Believe About Trade Deficits Is Wrong With Michael Klein – RFP 109
What Tariffs, Trade Deficits, and the Dollar Actually Do to Commercial Real Estate: Michael Klein on RFP 109 Most commercial...
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Finding The Right Building For Office-To-Residential Conversion
What the ideal office-to-residential conversion looks like, and what makes a good deal Almost every office building in Chicagoland can...
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Why Institutional Capital Is Wrong About Workforce Housing With Jon Siegel – RFP 108
Why Institutional Capital Is Wrong About Workforce Housing With Jon Siegel - RFP 108 Most multifamily capital is crowded into...
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Why Family Real Estate Portfolios Collapse With Dr. Carey Chronis – RFP 107
Why Family Real Estate Portfolios Collapse With Dr. Carey Chronis - RFP 107 Commercial real estate portfolios rarely collapse because...
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Why Smart Investors Are Buying Dirt With Ron Rohde – RFP 106
Why Industrial Outdoor Storage Is the Asset Class Big Capital Cannot Easily Buy: Lessons From Ronald Rohde https://youtu.be/vxrTHcuZdOE Why Smart...
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Why Blackstone Is Pouring Billions Into Net Leases With Sean Hostert – RFP 105
Net Lease Decoded: Why the Quietest Corner of Commercial Real Estate Is Drawing the Loudest Capital Most commercial real estate...
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Inference AI Is Rewriting The Commercial Real Estate Site Selection Playbook
How Inference and AI Could Rewrite the Entire Site Selection Playbook for Commercial Real Estate The old site selection checklist...
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Sidley Austin’s 725 Randolph Signals More Office Trouble?
Sidley Austin's 725 Randolph Move Is a Warning Shot for Chicago's Office Market When the city's most storied law firm...
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The AI Real Estate Goldmine Everyone’s Missing With Bruce Garrison – RFP 104
The Underground Layer That Decides Which AI Data Centers Get Built In commercial real estate, the data center conversation almost...
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Pulling Off the Largest Office-to-Residential Conversion In History With Eugene Flotteron – RFP 103
The Conversion Underwriting Playbook: What 25 Water Street Teaches CRE About Turning Distressed Office Into Housing The largest completed office-to-residential...
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Insuring Commercial Real Estate in the Age of Big Data and AI
Navigating Today's Commercial Real Estate Insurance Markets For decades, insuring a commercial building was a relationship business. A broker walked...
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Commercial Real Estate Doomers, Gurus, & Industrial Opportunity With Chad Griffiths – RFP 102
Chad Griffiths on Industrial Real Estate's Next Decade Industrial real estate may be the most universal asset class in commercial...
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The Industrial Real Estate Risk Playbook With Daniel S. North – RFP 101
The Industrial Real Estate Risk Playbook With Daniel S. North For most of the last decade, the legal language buried...
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Hydrogen, Data Centers, And The End Of Energy Poverty With Whitaker Irvin Jr. — RFP 100
When Power Becomes the Site Constraint: Hydrogen, Data Centers, and the New Math of Industrial Development For most of the...
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