Bryan McLaren: Navigating Cannabis Commercial Real Estate, Real Finds Podcast #8 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast series where we interview key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Bryan McLaren, Chairman and CEO of Zoned Properties. Zoned Properties is a leading real estate development firm for emerging and highly regulated industries, including regulated cannabis. On the podcast, we discuss the keys to cannabis site location, the ins and outs of financing highly regulated deals, and the evolution of cannabis real estate from the Wild West to a complex, mature growth industry. Thank you, Bryan, for hopping on the podcast today. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Bryan McLaren: Thanks, Gordon, and good morning or good afternoon to everyone, depending on when you’re tuning in. I’m Bryan McLaren, Chairman and CEO of Zoned Properties. We’re based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we’re a specialty real estate development firm focused on highly complex and regulated real estate development. But 99% of what we’ve done recently, and really for the past decade, is regulated cannabis. We serve third-party clients with real estate services like advisory and consulting, we have a full commercial brokerage doing that work nationally, and we have an investment, acquisition, and development arm where we put capital into projects, step in as landlord or developer, and place licensed cannabis tenants in those sites. It’s been a wild ride for the past decade. It’s a fast-paced, highly complex industry that’s never boring.
How Regulated Cannabis Came to Be
Gordon Lamphere: How do you get into the industry? There are a lot of stories of how people get into the cannabis space. How does someone get in from the commercial real estate perspective?
Bryan McLaren: For the audience, it might help to answer with a preamble about regulated cannabis for context. For anyone who’s seen headlines about marijuana coming to their community, for the past 20 years there’s been a grassroots movement, very similar to environmental sustainability or energy policy reform, a national, community-by-community advocacy movement to rethink how we treat cannabis, which to this day is still a federally illegal substance. Over the past few decades, state by state, voters have primarily passed ballot initiatives to legalize regulated cannabis systems. There’s also been state legislative reform, and now four to five years of federal discussion about how to legalize it at the federal level. When I say it’s highly complex and volatile, that’s what I mean: you have a puzzle board that’s hyperlocal, which most commercial developers are familiar with. The variables that impact real estate development vary city to city and county to county across the forty thousand localities in this country.
So how does one get into it? My background is in sustainable development. I spent many years in graduate school doing research, then worked for some of the largest higher education universities and Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, building sustainable systems around complex challenges like zero waste, or putting up a local renewable energy source, a wind turbine, in a city that had never had one. How do you bring new concepts to the local level and navigate the complexity of code, law, and real estate development? I was that guy at a bunch of organizations. About 12 years ago, in 2010 to 2012, the regulated cannabis discussion was heightening in the Southwest, California and Arizona, and I was introduced to a group looking at pursuing the business. One thing that seemed to be missing was real estate and compliance knowledge, the same things I was doing in sustainable development, applied to the newly regulated cannabis space. Fast forward a decade, and that’s the same idea we built Zoned Properties from. Our goal is to bring real estate solutions to cannabis operators, the businesses licensed to do this regulated work, and to real estate owners. Across 40,000 localities, the cannabis regulations and real estate laws are different in almost every one, and we make sure there’s a good match between a cannabis operator and a piece of property, whether they become an owner-operator or it’s a long-term investment-grade lease, a sale-leaseback, and so on.
How Diverse Is the Asset Class
Gordon Lamphere: Cannabis is a diverse space, and there’s a lot of confusion. People think it’s just the retail location, or just grow houses. How diverse is the asset class?
Bryan McLaren: It’s pretty diverse, and to understand why, it’s connected to how this legalized state by state in different ways at different times. One of the most important things to understand about commercial real estate and cannabis is the licenses that allow tenants or owner-operators to run a legal facility. Some states have vertical licensing all the way through the supply chain, where a licensed owner can have the cultivation rights, the processing rights, a kitchen and edibles manufacturing, infused beverage manufacturing, distribution, delivery, warehousing, and the consumer-facing retail dispensary doors. In other states, those license tiers are broken apart, and each state has different regulations on size and quantity. It’s very similar to the history of alcohol prohibition and liquor distributor licenses, or casino licenses, like the famous riverboat casinos in the Midwest. The same thing is occurring in cannabis as prohibition lifts. The asset classes are directly impacted by that licensing.
Some states have extremely limited licensing, a handful statewide. Some are unlimited, thousands of licenses. That matters for real estate because until we have federal reform, there is no interstate transport, so each state market is its own case study, its own vacuum. The primary asset classes are large land development and agricultural greenhouse, industrial in suburban population centers, and commercial retail. And you’re typically dealing with either owner-operated sites, which is a risk mitigation mechanism for the operator so they don’t have a landlord holding them hostage on a lease renewal, or mostly triple-net, investment-grade passive leases, where the landlord is protecting the building and collecting a rent check.
Three Barriers for Landlords
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve worked with investors where potential cannabis users came in, and there’s a lot of complexity and challenge. Landlords who are already pretty profitable are often hesitant. Is there a large contingent of operators that lease? It seems like most are owner-users or sale-leasebacks.
Bryan McLaren: It’s a unique class of property owner that has navigated the system. If you do it well, and you have people on your team who understand the complexity, whether internally or as a family office building a small REIT, it can be very profitable. Because of the difficult zoning and permitting in each locality, if you’re in a densely populated area with limited property available, your property could yield two, three, or more multiples of premium rent. You have to be careful, because you don’t want to choke your tenant. Just because you can demand something doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.
The reason it’s still very early, with a lot of owners and landlords watching from the sidelines, is that until federal reform, there are real barriers to entry, real fatal flaws. The first big one is insurance. Now that the industry has matured, your insurance carrier probably has an exclusion for cannabis. Anyone with a cannabis tenant listening right now, go check your insurance policy and see if the word cannabis is mentioned, and if not, check with your agency. Commercial debt is the second. Almost all commercial lending facilities have policies against federally illegal activity. There are now capital sources, banks, and REITs that will finance these properties, but make sure yours knows what your building is operating with its tenancy so it doesn’t void anything or trigger defaults. Check with your attorneys. The third is servicing. That’s a huge barrier for big commercial landlords, especially at the retail level, where these are typically small footprint doors of 2,000 to 5,000 square feet. If you have a $200 million center anchored by a grocery or a movie theater, your property management and servicing company may disallow cannabis, or it voids part of that agreement, or your anchor tenant has waiver rights over what other tenancies can be present. We had a really big project in an amazing center here in Scottsdale where an anchor tenant was highly religiously affiliated and did not want cannabis in the site. All the zoning got done, it was an amazing deal that would have brought foot traffic back, the landlord wanted it, but the anchor tenant said no and it killed the deal.
Those are the three critical pieces for anyone looking to get into cannabis. Then there’s the complexity of zoning and permitting, and making sure your development design meets state and local cannabis regulations for the physical infrastructure: security, safe rooms, ingress and egress that’s a little different from standard retail. What we like to say, Gordon, is make sure you have a real estate brain trust on your team. If you’re a broker, a real estate professional, or an investor, make sure someone on your team has cannabis experience. We often engage with third-party clients as that fractional, outsourced brain trust.
The exciting thing about the start of 2023 is that one of my big predictions for this year is that it will be the first year we see a mass joining of standard real estate professionals into cannabis. The tipping point, the toothpaste out of the tube. Over 40 states now have some form of regulated cannabis, whether medical only, adult use, or restrictive CBD-related programs like Texas has. The vast majority of voters want this. Every poll I’ve seen over the past six to twelve months shows 70% to 80% support across parties and demographics. If you’re interested in touching the space, find some expertise, read everything you can, and listen to conversations like this one where we talk about the nitty-gritty.
Financing in a Federally Illegal Industry
Gordon Lamphere: You touched on security, which a friend of mine in Chicagoland cannabis has worried about for a while. But one of the most important topics in the industry is financing, and a lot of it relates to build-outs. At least in Chicagoland, a lot of cannabis spaces have been rehabs in traditionally disadvantaged communities converted to growing facilities. How does one finance a major rehab without traditional banking?
Bryan McLaren: That is literally the million and billion dollar question. For scope, cannabis is now doing around $25 billion in sales nationally. Best estimates put the total net economic impact for the country as high as $150 billion, maybe $200 billion in the decades to come. We have decent data from the history of crime reports on how much product has been impounded and how many arrests have related to marijuana, unfortunately still a federally illegal substance, so we know this is a hugely growing, high-demand industry. With those industries come major real estate financing needs. Our best estimate is that over the next decade, there will be a need for around $80 to $90 billion of commercial real estate infrastructure investment and development. These are huge grow sites, $50 or $100 million greenhouse agricultural projects, like we saw in Canada. You have to be careful with those, because a lot of companies want high-technology automation, which is a very customized tenant improvement that can be difficult to recover highest-and-best-use value from if your cannabis tenant has challenges. Then there are the retail consumer-facing dispensary doors. There are currently around 9,000 active retail cannabis licenses in this country. Liquor has around 42,000. So if you look at coffee shops or liquor doors, there’s serious room for growth. This year alone, about 2,500 additional retail licenses were added nationally, so we’re probably looking at $6 to $8 billion for retail commercial development.
How do we get that money? Until there’s federal reform, your best options are local credit unions, local banks, and private lenders. We recently secured a 10-year debt structure with a bank, and we got in right at the squeak, locking in around 7.5% for cannabis projects on a 10-year term. With interest rates rising, those get challenging. Prime plus two, prime plus four is what you tend to see on the debt side in cannabis real estate, and that’s a lot more expensive today, especially on a five-year loan. Bridge and mezzanine funding with cannabis use involved tends to be three-year terms or shorter at 12% to 15% once you add upfront points. So a lot of times, private investors are your best bet. You connect with a family office, show your experience in real estate development and investing, and have a good operator in tow. We’re really focused on the investment side with clients we’ve served and know well, so we know the group and their sophistication and aren’t going in blind. That’s really important in cannabis.
The only other option that’s funded the majority of the cannabis space has been real estate investment trusts. They’ve focused primarily on large-scale industrial and commercial sites housing cultivation and the supply chain, a bigger bang for the buck than small footprint retail. Small retail is our specialty, because we love the frequency and we have the expertise to navigate projects efficiently. Our best guess is that somewhere around $20 billion, maybe as high as $30 billion, has gone into commercial cannabis real estate so far, and about $15 billion of that came through cannabis REITs. But if anyone in the audience is looking to run a cannabis business and find real estate solutions, the metrics are really important. Just because someone is willing to give you a couple million, or even ten million, to fund your site, once you sign that lease you have to make the rental payment. How big is the delta from non-cannabis use? If you’re an outside investor, maybe an LP looking at cannabis funds, what is that GP looking at? Are they putting capital into projects with a 10x delta if something goes wrong, and what’s the dark value? Those are critical elements if you’re going to get involved. But the opportunity is huge. This is probably a once-in-a-generation emerging industry, and if you can navigate the labyrinth, there’s a significant reward at the end of the risk critical path.
Cultivation: High Risk, High Reward
Gordon Lamphere: I’m a Led Zeppelin fan, so you can keep rambling on. You have three primary asset classes: growing, processing, and retail. What makes a growing facility in cannabis different from other industrial or warehouse use?
Bryan McLaren: I’m certainly not a cannabis cultivation expert. There are legacy experts, as I refer to them, who come from the pre-regulated era, some third generation. Northern California’s Humboldt County is famous for amazing product. But what we hear from operators is that it’s really dependent on the product they want to produce. The two lanes of the growing asset class are greenhouse agricultural sites and indoor industrial sites: highly climate-controlled environmental agriculture using artificial lighting to manipulate the plant cycle and produce a harvest yield, and using technology in those facilities. The proptech side of cannabis is fascinating, and we’re doing a bunch with that too.
It’s significantly connected to consumer demand yields in any given state. What we saw in Canada was a big roller coaster. When Canada legalized a few years ago, the leading cannabis companies built multi-hundred-million-dollar facilities, and the commercial cultivation asset class rose in value. But Canada, and I’m Canadian, so I say this with love, only has about 33 or 34 million people, and supply got out of whack with demand. You saw a bunch of hundred-million-plus cultivation facilities close, because the surplus was so large and there’s no international transport yet. The biggest risk on the agricultural and industrial side is making sure the scalability of the facility, your capex, and your return calculations match what you can actually yield into the marketplace, wholesale or retail.
One fascinating thing about commercial real estate in cannabis is trying to find good comps. In traditional industry, a hundred industrial facilities sold last year, here are the rates and potential NOI from various tenancies, here’s a standard cap rate, here’s what your property is worth. In cannabis, that premium for highest and best use is much more akin to a jewelry store, a casino, or the new sportsbook facilities popping up. If anything changes with the real estate’s ability to operate that use, the capex may be so specialized that nobody else needs it, and you take significant impairment. That asset class is high risk, high reward. That’s why we like the retail side. Even if you have a three-to-four multiple from supply and demand, the tenant isn’t being choked from a cash flow perspective, and there isn’t huge risk in the ability to replace them. But it’s very different state to state. Oklahoma has thousands of licenses; Connecticut has a couple dozen. New York and New Jersey are fascinating case studies right now because they’re implementing new programs, especially New York, which is very focused on repairing the harm of the war on drugs through social equity programs and reinvesting in those communities. But some of that creates restrictive investment barriers, ownership restrictions, debt-versus-equity rules, and how it connects to the real estate goes on and on.
Retail: The Four Ps
Gordon Lamphere: In Chicagoland, we’ve seen the families owning many of the operations look a lot like the families that got liquor licensing early on, very politically connected, some sharing names with governors or former governors. Going back to infrastructure, you’re retail specialists. What are the unique demands of a retail operation? It’s not a standard big box.
Bryan McLaren: This wraps in the security piece you mentioned. On the public-facing retail side, I’m not sure cannabis is all that different from other really high-demand retail doors that create interesting challenges. Look at Chick-fil-A: sales per store went up to something like $6.8 million on average, and they see about a thousand people a day, several multiples over the next most popular fast food chains. Dutch Bros is big in the Southwest; in Canada, it’s Tim Hortons; Dunkin’ elsewhere. How do you deal with vehicle and foot traffic flow? Cannabis is no different. It’s a very high-demand industry, and most densely populated areas can expect significant foot traffic. Some major cannabis brands have a cult following, like In-N-Out. The first In-N-Out in Tennessee is opening, and they’ll probably have lines around the block.
Gordon Lamphere: Especially with all the California natives in Tennessee now.
Bryan McLaren: Which is another good point. Per capita demographic consumer data is really influential in cannabis. It may not be well known, but if you had a room of fifty people, asked everyone to close their eyes and raise their hand if they were a cannabis user, you’d see a lot of hands go up. The paradigm is still shifting from a hundred years of false propaganda, the devil’s lettuce, you’ll go crazy if you smoke a joint. We have a lot of quiet consumers, and that influences demand.
So it’s important to design the retail door accordingly. Many localities and states, because this is so new and for reasons that don’t make sense to many of us in the industry, restrict or disallow drive-through or delivery. You have to walk up and show ID, similar to a liquor store. So your design matters, and parking is a huge one. We say the four Ps of retail cannabis are parking, perimeter, power, and permit. People, your workforce, is another big one. A lot of locations require a secure perimeter, sometimes even on retail, which makes driving in challenging. Since there’s no drive-through or delivery, imagine what In-N-Out’s or Chick-fil-A’s parking would need without a drive-through. You’d need a movie theater lot, a Walmart lot.
Local town managers and planning offices are the heroes of cannabis. Planning offices get a bad rap as the bad guy rejecting permits, but this is a brand-new industry with new regulations, and these are individuals trying to serve their community and their master plan while learning a new industry. The great thing about 2023 versus ten or even two years ago is that planning offices are talking to each other. These are discussion points at the National League of Cities. Planning directors are calling other planning directors: how was your experience, how did you handle this? Those discussions influence how they regulate parking, perimeter, power, and permit. Power isn’t as big a deal for retail; it’s a big one for industrial and suburban, with heavy cooling and lighting needs, and even small manufacturing. Another emerging asset class we’ve watched is crypto mining sites. We get calls asking for a thousand-square-foot industrial lease with 10,000 amps. That doesn’t really exist. Same challenges in cannabis.
Our clients tend to be either proactive, what the industry calls SSOs and MSOs, single-state and multi-state operators, which matters because with no interstate transport you’re setting up hubs in each state, each regulated differently. We help those multi-unit retailers find new sites and navigate development regulations and design. Or they’re triage clients who got a permit in a location with no blueprint for planning these, opened a dispensary with four parking stalls, and are dealing with an angry community because cars are parked everywhere and traffic is backed up. It comes back to the point that this is an emerging industry with serious demand, and how you embrace it as a local community impacts the real estate. If you’re a long-term triple-net landlord, you want your tenant thriving wildly so they keep paying that premium rent. If they fail, you’re the one dealing with whether the license is attached to your property, whether the permit needs renewal, and all that fun stuff.
Site Selection and Green Zones
Gordon Lamphere: Can you talk more about site selection? We’ve seen sites that were great for folks, and some that have been a mess. I won’t name the village, but I was recently discussing one nearby with its village manager. In Illinois, everyone knows the state has financial issues, so a lot of localities are very willing to allow retail for the tax revenue. What are the major factors driving site selection?
Bryan McLaren: Great focus point. Site selection is probably the most active thing we do as a company, nationally. It’s the highest-demand service need and our bread and butter. I mentioned our advisory and consulting, brokerage, and investment divisions, but we also have a fourth division for property technology, and that’s critical to site selection. It’s probably the single most challenging part of getting a cannabis facility up and running: all the factors beyond general business considerations. On retail, where’s good vehicle traffic, signage exposure, frontage, and what can I do to my building to bring consumers in. On manufacturing and industrial grow sites, where’s power availability and where’s the workforce? If you need a hundred people at a $20 million grow house, make sure that demographic of worker is available in that community.
The great news is we now have enough data. Ten years ago it was, you’re promising tax dollars, we’ll believe it when we see it. Now we’ve seen it. Illinois is amazing because about four years ago cannabis tax revenue eclipsed liquor tax revenue for the state. We’ve done a bunch of site selection work in Illinois, Ohio, and the Midwest. The critical piece is zoning. In cannabis real estate, we call them green zones, the parcels that meet zoning restrictions and regulations. I’m generalizing, but essentially you have to be in the right zoning, C-2 or commercial business, which varies by locality, and meet various restrictions. The most difficult are protected-use setbacks. Almost all communities that enact cannabis real estate codes require, and they’re different everywhere, that you be a thousand feet from a school or daycare, five hundred feet from a residential district or park. Right off the bat, you’re dealing with a highly nebulous challenge. It’s not just, show me the purple-shaded parcels. You have to draw all these setback circles. Forever we did that by hand, literally on Google Earth, working with the municipalities. There was no blueprint.
The industry and what we provide have come a long way. We’ve invested in a proprietary proptech platform that uses AI and machine learning to crawl each locality and create interactive maps. It’s called Rezone, and we’ve been in beta testing for the past year. We expect to launch pretty imminently, likely in the next month or two. It’s not a perfect tool. We call it an efficiency tool, getting all the GIS layers and data points in one place. It won’t find you the needle in the haystack, but it will tell you which haystack to look in.
That’s step one in site selection: what works. The challenge most clients hit before they call us, an informed broker, or a land use attorney is that they start with traditional metrics: foot traffic demographics, per capita income, publicly listed commercial sites, and then check the ones they like. That’s what you do in general, but it’s very inefficient here. They fall in love with a couple of sites, even negotiate leases, ready to sign, only to find the zoning doesn’t work and they can’t get a permit. So in cannabis site selection, you start with the regulatory side, the most difficult part. It’s taken us 10 years to do it efficiently. Most clients come to us saying, we have four dispensary doors in our first state, we’ve figured out the business, we’re cash flowing and very profitable, and we want to 5x across three new states. Go find us 10 sites. Illinois has a new licensing round coming, I think 55 new social equity licenses. Very important to check the regulations, because some new licenses require you to identify, secure, and confirm real estate before you can apply. Others allow you to apply conditionally and add the location after you’re awarded, within a set period. New Jersey has conditional retail licenses where you don’t need the real estate until after the award, and now hundreds of awardees are calling us and other brokers, competing for very limited properties that work. On top of that, everything in traditional commercial real estate: does the financial equation work, how’s the landlord, is there debt attached to the property, does it need a refi, should I be owner-operator, the fifty or so variables of commercial real estate.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: We’re heading toward the end. We could talk for hours on this, and we’ll have a follow-up. On the Real Finds Podcast, we always ask a Final Four, the same general questions of everybody, with very different answers. The first: 10 years from now, what do you think will have changed the most about cannabis and the real estate industry?
Bryan McLaren: General adoption. Community-level, neighborhood, street-corner adoption. We didn’t get into this, maybe for the follow-up, but cannabis is treated as a NIMBY industry, not in my backyard. Most of us in commercial real estate know that. So I think the biggest change over ten years is that cannabis, which has forever been treated with false propaganda as dangerous for our communities, will be recognized, if done right, as one of the most critical factors for community prosperity: economic growth, property value increases, tax dollars for reinvestment, decreases in violent crime, and safer communities as you stop arresting people for minor marijuana offenses. That’s the whole debate about justice and social equality within our communities. The biggest change will be acceptance of this emerging industry, the influx of traditional professionals that normalizes it, and, I’m hopeful, prosperity metrics proven across the board from the work we do, if we get it right.
Gordon Lamphere: One quick follow-up. Every industry consolidates as it matures. Do you think we’ll have the same diversity in the industry ten years from now, or will it be much more consolidated and branded?
Bryan McLaren: Great question, tough question. We’re in an M&A consolidation phase of the evolution curve. We’ve definitely moved from early innovator to early adopter, and 2023 to 2025 may be the crossing of the chasm into the early majority. It’s the federal restrictions that are really hurting the diversity of this industry, in my opinion, especially the financial and capital restrictions. You have this massive grassroots movement with a very diverse base of legacy operators and knowledge experts who know the product and how it treats a patient or a consumer. But the lack of access to banking, capital, and insurance, and all the real estate difficulties, is allowing large corporate cannabis entities to thrive and consolidate to compete. The costs are very real: increased legal and compliance costs, and the federal tax situation is pretty wild if you’re a plant-touching company. Without going further down the rabbit hole, will we see increased diversity of operators, races, nationalities, ages, and experiences? I’m hopeful the grassroots culture remains. We need it. The industry will be sorely hurt if we lose it. But we need to open the door for all of those individuals to compete fairly and not suffer from restrictions that only huge, well-funded corporations can surpass. I’m pro everything, mom-and-pop to corporation, but diversity needs an equal playing field. Unfortunately, over the past five years we’ve seen a decrease in minority-owned and female-owned businesses in cannabis, and a lot of that has to do with access to capital.
Gordon Lamphere: That could be a whole separate conversation. I haven’t done cannabis deals, but we’ve done a lot with traditional liquor and brewery groups, and everything changed in 1979 with Jimmy Carter. Federal legalization of cannabis will ultimately change things when it comes. Second question of the Final Four, one of my favorites: if you could travel back to the start of your career, what advice would you give young Bryan?
Bryan McLaren: There’s probably a lot. Surround yourself with like-minded individuals who share your values and long-term vision. I did okay at that, but I didn’t realize its importance, especially in a difficult industry like cannabis. We’ve worked hard at it over the past five or six years, growing from one or two people to about fifteen, opening new state brokerage offices with amazing individuals. Talent acquisition and investment is so critical. Surround yourself with people who care about the same things and share the same business, investment, and work culture, and you’ll thrive.
Gordon Lamphere: Great advice. Another favorite: what real estate or business books have influenced your career the most?
Bryan McLaren: I’m an avid reader and a perpetual student, and I digest all the real estate and investing books. But the one I refer to and think about most often isn’t strictly a real estate book: Crossing the Chasm. An amazing book about entrepreneurship and emerging industries, and how you get past the growth point that sinks most businesses. For real estate, it’s critical, especially as a startup investor working on your first few projects, because economy of scale in real estate is everything.
Gordon Lamphere: Great one. Our final question is the most important, because the whole point of the Real Finds Podcast is to find people who are influencing the industry and changing the world. Who should we bring on next? It can be an activist, a scientist, someone at Zoned.
Bryan McLaren: I’ll do a two-part answer, a selfish internal one and an external one. Berekk Blackwell is our Chief Operating Officer, with the company for a couple of years now, an extremely talented, kind, and hardworking individual. I’m so excited we have him on the team, and he’s thriving. He’s built out our national advising and brokerage services and is boots-in-the-mud, in the trenches with our clients, with a lot of great stories. We’d love to get him on the podcast. For a big-name individual I always love hearing from and respect a lot, Steve DeAngelo. He’s one of the grandfathers of cannabis. Harborside, his original dispensary in Northern California, really paved the way for the industry to regulate. There are so many individuals, but he’s one. I know he’s crazy busy, but if we could get him on, it would be a really great conversation.
Gordon Lamphere: We can be pretty persuasive. Bryan, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast. It’s been an absolute blessing to have you on, and we’ll have to have you on again.
Bryan McLaren: Wonderful. I’d love to come back anytime, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions matter for the podcast algorithm and help us continue to get the guests our viewers want to listen to and learn from. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. 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 energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented 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 Q3 2026.