A conversation between Gordon Lamphere, J.D. of Van Vlissingen and Co. and Chad Griffiths, SIOR, a partner at NAI Commercial Edmonton and creator of the industrial real estate podcast Industrial Advisors. Transcript edited for clarity.
Chad Griffiths: I don’t think there’s any slowdown of people wanting to shop online and have things delivered to their house. The warehouses have to get closer to us. So that’s the problem: nobody wants these. And now the news is data centers. People are saying we don’t want these data centers. And it’s largely the same problem.
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, 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 Chad Griffiths, SIOR, a partner at NAI Commercial Edmonton who specializes in industrial real estate. Besides a successful career as an industrial real estate broker and investor, Chad is an author and the creator of the commercial real estate industry’s most-watched industrial real estate podcast. On today’s show, we take a deep dive into global industrial real estate trends, opportunities in the market for investors and occupiers, and Chad uncovers the secret to breaking through the social media noise without selling your soul. It’s a well-worth listen. Chad, thank you so much for hopping on today.
Chad Griffiths: Honored to be here. Good to see you again, Gordon, and I’m a big fan of the Real Finds Podcast and excited to be a guest.
Gordon Lamphere: And yours as well. So what got you into the real estate industry? You are one of the more enthusiastic industrial people I’ve ever met. What got you started in industrial real estate?
Chad Griffiths: It was purely accidental, actually. Going way back, I was one of those kids who was always entrepreneurial. I’d cut grass or shovel, and I remember one time when I was ten or eleven I set up a booth selling hockey cards on the side of the road. Some Canadian thing. I was always that kid, and as I went through college I got the itch for real estate and tried flipping a few houses, never really had success with it, but I really liked real estate. So I decided to become an agent. I spent one year as a residential agent back in 2004 and decided I wanted to do commercial. I thought it’d be shopping malls and skyscrapers, that really cool element of commercial, and ended up joining an office that focused on industrial. Purely accidental, but I’m so glad it happened, because it changed the trajectory of my life. Twenty-some years later, I love every element of it. I love reading about it, I love learning new things about it. Even after all this time, where I’d consider myself somewhat of an expert, I still find myself learning and excited to get up every day and see what I can learn and add to the community. As Bob Ross would say, it was a happy accident, and it grabbed my career.
Gordon Lamphere: Anybody in this industry who tells you they know it all, that usually shows they’re somewhere that’s not particularly great on the Dunning-Kruger graph. I always try to learn as well. In terms of learning, one thing I’m not super familiar with, and I think many of our guests aren’t, is the Alberta market. It’s not something Chicago typically interacts with directly, even though it’s a key market for global energy and a wide range of important industrial assets. So what’s Alberta like these days?
Chad Griffiths: Great question. We’re a little further west of what you’d probably deal with, since you’d be interacting with Toronto and Manitoba quite a bit. We’re a big oil and gas market, so economically, politically, and culturally we’re very similar to Texas. It’s almost crazy how similar it is. Big oil and gas drives our entire economy. When oil is priced high, which it is right now, that usually spurs on a lot more activity. And when oil drops, anybody would remember the day in 2016 when it went to minus thirty-nine dollars a barrel for one day; we thought the world was going to cave in. So we ride the highs and lows of oil. But it’s a big market. The city I’m in is Edmonton, the capital of Alberta. It’s not the biggest; Calgary is actually bigger, but we’re quite close. We have about 160 million square feet of industrial space, so we’d be a mid-tier market compared to a lot of US markets.
This is the one thing that strikes me as someone who follows a lot of industrial real estate markets across North America. What struck me early on is that there are so many similarities. There are nuances between my market and Chicago or Dallas or New York, local differences, but a building in my market, if I showed it to you without any context of where it was located, would look exactly the same as a building in another market. There are nuanced differences and micro-local differences, but what guides a good building and what tenants want in a building is universal. That’s one of the things that’s really attracted me to the industry. Like you said, we have to keep learning about this, because if you stay steady, you’re missing out on all these developing trends. In twenty years, the market has changed so much in tenant profile, demand, and what a good building looks like, that I can’t imagine someone who thinks they know it all, and the limitations that has for just missing everything that’s changing.
Gordon Lamphere: One hundred percent. You talked about universality and what you’re seeing universally in industrial real estate. You have one of the most prominent industrial podcasts around, seeing things from your guests and discussions with brokers in other markets. What do you think some of those universal trends look like? What are you seeing?
Chad Griffiths: The biggest one by far is the proliferation of data centers. You’d have to be hiding under a rock to not appreciate just how much demand there is for these data centers right now. The biggest challenge with data centers is power, and that’s not news to anybody. But what that’s affecting is not just the data centers themselves, but all the other buildings, because the grid is limited right now. We’re trying to bring on Three Mile Island, a decommissioned nuclear center, just because we need to fuel this demand. There are plans for more nuclear development, plans for all these companies to do on-site generation to meet this crazy amount of demand. But that also means that limited supply is getting spread thin. A lot of other companies in the non-data-center space are trying to get power as well. One, to avoid getting shut out if these data centers keep taking more. Two, their needs are also going up as we deal with the electrification of everything. Forklifts used to be propane-powered; it’s very common to see them electric now. The powered network inside, whether it’s conveyor belts or retrieval systems, all seems to be tied to electricity. The average warehouse, if you go back years, needed power to put on lights, maybe the odd piece of equipment, but a very low power draw. Fast forward to today, and these warehouses need a lot of power. So that’s the biggest one. Even if we removed the data center, companies on their own need a lot more power right now, and that’s causing challenges because the grid just wasn’t built to handle this crazy amount of power.
Then there are other things, just modernization of a building. Ceiling heights have gotten higher. Twenty years ago it would have been more common to see a twenty-four, maybe twenty-eight-foot ceiling. Now we’re seeing forty-foot-plus being common. Floor loading is always important, so that’s getting pushed. We’re seeing buildings that want more land as a component, in case there’s trailer storage or other storage needed. That’s been a big shift. But by far, power is driving the conversation on industrial development and tenant demand, without question.
Power as the master constraint on industrial development is a thread we followed with Bruce Garrison on fiber and site selection in The AI Real Estate Goldmine Everyone’s Missing and with Whitaker Irvin Jr. on power itself in Hydrogen, Data Centers, And The End Of Energy Poverty.
Gordon Lamphere: Are you seeing political instability play out in that process? In our market we’ve seen a tremendous need for additional power and reconfiguring buildings, but then you get to the costs. We have the immigration fight affecting labor markets, and you combine it with the tariffs and the war and all sorts of factors driving cost increases, and then deals just don’t pencil. What’s going on in your market in Canada, and what are you seeing generally across the US and Canada?
Chad Griffiths: You’ve got a submarket in Chicago, is it Deerfield, where they actually had a moratorium on warehouses?
Gordon Lamphere: There are several. There’s Deerfield, which shows how dialed in you are on the market. There have been moratoriums there. We have a moratorium on development in Lincolnshire as well, the locality I’m sitting in right now, or at least there was for a long time. There’s a lot of hesitancy toward it, and it’s been a huge issue. But at the same time, there’s an incredible need. So there’s that tension.
Chad Griffiths: That’s the best way I could describe it too: there’s a tension. The easy way to describe it is last-mile delivery. We all want packages fast. Gone are the days of two-day shipping; we want it now. In a lot of markets Amazon is delivering this. They rolled out thirty-minute delivery in a handful of US markets recently, because people want stuff now. The trade-off and the tension, which you said perfectly, is that if you want fast delivery, you need that warehouse very close to the population base. I live in a quiet area. We back onto a field, and I can’t even imagine what would happen if that green space got converted into a warehouse or distribution center, where we’d go from a quiet area to trucks coming and going at all hours. But that’s the trade-off. We want fast products. I don’t think there’s any slowdown of people wanting to shop online and have things delivered; that’s staying. The warehouses have to get closer to us. So that’s the problem: nobody wants these. There’s a moratorium in Deerfield, tons in California, a few in New York State, and I believe a few others where these communities are saying no, we don’t want these.
Now the news is data centers. People are saying we don’t want these data centers, and it’s largely the same problem: a lot of these data centers get located close to an urban zone, or in an area where all the local residents, even if it’s just farmers, are saying we don’t want a data center next to our fields. I can appreciate that. Ostensibly we need the data; these companies are telling us they need the data for these data centers, but the people don’t want them. This is going to cause a breaking point, I think, where there’s so much pushback that the big tech companies, who haven’t done a good job of selling to the community, myself included, on why we need all these data centers and why they need to go so close to residences, there’s a missing story there. There’s going to be more and more pushback on these big distribution centers going closer to residential areas, and data centers being built in general. Anytime there’s pushback like that, it leads to land scarcity, which drives up the price. I’m seeing that across the board on everything. Even if you just want to build out a simple office space inside a warehouse, it’s gotten crazy expensive. Inflation is rampant right now. It’s becoming very challenging to build anything. Add on building code changes, where every city and jurisdiction tends to make it more onerous with every new code change, adding something that adds to the cost. That trend has always been going up. It’s just becoming much more expensive to do things, and I think that’s a very real challenge that isn’t being addressed. I commend you for having this on your radar; more people need to be asking these questions.
Gordon Lamphere: I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s definitely not what we’re doing right now. In terms of finding solutions, what does this ultimately mean for occupiers and investors looking at the market? Is there a path forward? Do they just have to pay extra and try to redevelop current sites? Is the path forward looking at reconfiguration of existing assets? Where’s the path forward, or at least what are you seeing?
Chad Griffiths: It’s very industry-specific, I’d say at a high level. If you take a traditional 3PL or a warehousing company in general, on average they’re going to spend around five percent of their gross revenue on rent. Other industries can be twenty percent. So if they’re already spending twenty percent, they’re going to have thinner margins just from a larger allocation going toward rent. Whereas a company only spending five percent, if they can save on transportation costs, which can be upwards of fifty percent, by increasing their rent a little bit, that’s the calculus these companies start doing in terms of how much rent they can pay, if it helps them with labor or transportation costs. Whereas other companies, if they’re paying a higher number already, there might not be any more room to squeeze. They might be operating at such low margins that there just isn’t any more to go. That might create a point where these companies decide whether to keep going if they’re not profitable, and maybe that’s when they sell or consolidate or look at an exit altogether.
The word I’ve heard more than any and adopted myself is bifurcation. I think there’s going to be a bifurcation of industrial users. Some will do very, very well, and some will be pushed to the limit, to the breaking point where it’s just no longer profitable enough to run it. Overall, though, I think the market is quite strong. We’ve pulled back on development over the last couple of years. Whereas in 2022 and 2023 we added a ton of big-box industrial, that development pipeline has slowed down quite a bit and it’s being absorbed. There’s been positive absorption for a while now, so we’re chewing through a lot of that overbuild, and there isn’t a lot in the pipeline right now either. So if things stay the same and the economy hums along, I think we might get to a point in the next year or two where we start seeing upward pressure on rates again and tightening availability. But who knows? There’s so much geopolitical tension. What are your thoughts?
Gordon Lamphere: If I knew where geopolitical decisions were going, I’d be on the betting markets right now making a lot of money. The only thing I can expect going forward is more unpredictability. I think we’re in a world full of crazy people, for a variety of reasons. Whenever we try to look at plans, development plans, lease negotiations, or a sale purchase, you always know that in this world, with so much mental instability from everyone, including myself, everything is going a little wacky right now. That little doom box in our pocket is making us go crazy. So that’s the only thing we can always predict in deals, and that’s been pretty good to us as brokers, investors, and asset managers over the last decade. Beyond that, no idea.
So in terms of understanding how the doom box plays out and how things have been a little wacky, one of the things you’ve been generally good at online, and one reason I wanted to have you on right now, is that there’s been a lot of craziness on real estate social media lately, and I find you to be pretty reasonable. I’m curious how you’re seeing the real estate world interact with the social media world, and how we can go forward, both as people producing content, I hate the term influencers, and people consuming content, to make a less toxic space.
Chad Griffiths: That’s a great point, because we’re only getting more and more exposed to it, and future generations, that’s all they’re going to know. When I started in 2005, there wasn’t Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, none of that. So I grew into it, whereas the next generation is in it already. This is a topical issue. From my own experience and whatever insight I can glean, I think there are two ends of the spectrum on social media as it pertains to real estate, which are equally toxic, the far end of both. I try to place somewhere in the middle. On one end you have the doomsayers, the people who think the market’s going to crash at any minute, and all they’re posting is news that the Strait of Hormuz is still closed and missiles are getting fired and the economy’s going to collapse. That’s a very prominent section of social media, people just throwing out negative news. I think that’s the media’s playbook now. The media used to be very unbiased, just actual journalism, and I think it has shifted to just clicks. Negative news gets clicks. People think, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, that seems like a big deal, I should read more. The whole system is designed for that. That’s one side.
On the other side you have the ultra-rosy picture, the guru-grifter space, where you get someone holding himself out as an expert and putting out all this content, and he’s admitted himself that his marketing strategy is to post cringy content about how people can become millionaires in real estate and get rich quick. That’s his marketing funnel; he’s admitted it online. To me that’s equally as bad, if not more dangerous, to the average investor who subscribes literally and physically to the notion that you can suddenly get rich quick on real estate, which I think is very dangerous. You have the Grant Cardones, the Robert Kiyosakis, all these guys whose entire system is selling courses or getting people to buy things they’re selling or become investors in their funds. I think that’s also dangerous. So those are the two ends of the spectrum.
I try to be more in the middle with what I create. Sometimes I go off on a tangent if I get worked up. We all know we’re all a bit mentally unstable and can become unhinged a little, and sometimes it happens to the best of us. I try to be like an old-school journalist. If I have any concept of a social media plan, and I really don’t, I’m like a dog chasing a car, but if I were to distill it, I’d say I try to be like an old-school journalist just reporting things that are interesting. No agenda, not trying to sell a course. I’ve never raised a single dollar as a GP; I have zero intent of raising money. I’m not trying to sell anything other than a book, so to be forthright, I do have a book I try to sell every once in a while. But I’m not trying to influence people beyond reporting on things I think are interesting. I think that’s a safe space to play in. As soon as you get lured in either direction, saying I can help other people become rich, or pretend I can, or that the sky is falling, as soon as you get tugged in either one of those directions, that’s where it becomes a bit dangerous. The theme of what I would say is that I really don’t know. I’m just trying to live every day, try to be positive, try not to get dragged down into too much negativity, but we’re all human and I don’t think any of us really know what’s going to happen tomorrow. So you’ve got to have fun with it. If you’re on social media, it has to be fun. As soon as you start treating it like a job or responsibility, it shows. So I just try to have fun with it. That’d be my overall goal.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve worked as a GP on projects, and we don’t really directly raise off our social media, though we’ve had people come in. I’ll regurgitate this a thousand times: I think you can generally slowly build wealth through commercial real estate. I don’t think it’s a get-rich-quick scheme. If that’s your scheme, maybe try Bitcoin or something more volatile. Volatility in commercial real estate tends to only go one way if things are really volatile, and that way usually isn’t the good way. So we’d never push that. The sad thing you mentioned too is the doomerism. We had one video with a guest, and I won’t mention the name because I think she’s a very nice person, but she was a little bit of a doomer on our podcast. It had like six thousand views in probably forty-eight hours, which is more than we usually get, probably two to three times what we usually get at that point. It was more of a doomer podcast, and I had a conversation with my wife: hey, should we maybe lean into this, it seems to be profitable, we get a lot of views? And we said, no, we want to tell the truth generally. The next podcast was a somewhat moderate take on the industrial market and it got a thousand views. So that’s probably the hardest balance we see. Then it becomes a balance for the consumer too. Whenever I’m watching a video, I try to consciously think, am I supporting something that’s good? Because the longer I watch, the more it gets shown to other people. I think that’s such a challenging issue of our times.
Gordon Lamphere: Part of those challenging issues is that there’s a lot of misinformation online. One of the documentaries, would you consider it a documentary, that you did on cap rates, I thought was wonderful. Some of the investors we work with who are newer to the industry have a variety of views on the cap rate. Can you talk about how you created a documentary on probably one of the most misunderstood parts of the real estate business, and why you thought that was important?
Chad Griffiths: Thanks for bringing that up. That was a project I wanted to do because it should be the easiest formula and definition in commercial real estate. It’s the one everybody learns day one. But I kept hearing more and more people argue about it, and I thought, I’m going to ask twelve really smart people I know what a cap rate is. That was the first question I asked: what’s a cap rate? Then I dig into it a little after. Twelve people, one of the guys has three master’s degrees and is a developer, very smart and successful; a couple were professors; a couple owned hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of real estate; some brokers, lawyers, you name it. A very smart group of twelve people answered this, and not one of them agreed with another. I didn’t have them all in a group, so it wasn’t an argument, but there wasn’t a single consensus on what a cap rate was. Every one had a slightly different answer, and in some cases a completely different answer.
To your point on misinformation, I don’t even think it’s deliberate, people trying to mislead intentionally. I think there’s just so much nuance and personal experience baked into these answers that things can be different. What I took away is that a cap rate is whatever it means to the individual investor, but to get that answer requires a lot of work and effort. I don’t think you can just read a cap rate in a textbook. You can dumb it down, it’s just NOI over value, but what is the NOI? Is it stabilized? Forward-looking? Pro forma? Is the value the sales price, the assessed value, the appraised value, a future appraised value? One guy, Brian Burke, who I interviewed and consider a definitive expert, said he calculated with his team thirty-two different ways of calculating a cap rate based on all those variables of what the NOI is and what the value is. If you have thirty-two different ways of calculating something, how are you ever going to have consensus? It was a very interesting experience, because I thought I’d be able to triangulate all that information and say here’s what a cap rate is, and there is no answer. There’s no simple answer from what should be the most simple calculation available.
Gordon Lamphere: We’re trying to bring a couple of properties to market over the next couple of months for some investors we’ve worked with and some who’ve just come in for us to sell their assets, and it’s very difficult to come to a consensus, particularly on complex properties with a wide range of assets or tenants, to develop a cap rate that’s generally marketable. It’s a misunderstood term, particularly by some of the social media value-add investors. Even a phrase like value-add is very misunderstood generally. It can go to the degree of someone just repainting the building and striping the parking lot and putting an extra comma on there, or it could be an actual material change for a building that has maybe fifteen to twenty percent occupancy to a fully occupied building. That’s the challenge of our times. We can go into these challenges for ages, and we don’t need to relitigate some of the things that occurred on social media in the last two or three weeks. But we can dive into what we love to do on this podcast, our Real Finds Final Four. One thing I love to ask guests, because they tend to know the most about what’s happening in the market: what’s the one topic we’re not talking about enough?
Chad Griffiths: That’s a great question. I think there’s one that’s the most important: what happens to all these data centers if we no longer need data centers? I’d elaborate by saying technology advances at a rapid pace. We’ve all seen the example that fifty years ago a computer would have required an entire room, and now you can put considerably more power on something the size of a fingernail. So what happens to data centers if we push them into the ocean, or into space, or they just shrink because we need less building for the compute? What happens to these buildings? These are purpose-built buildings that are very expensive, upwards of eight hundred dollars a square foot in some cases, whereas a traditional industrial building might be two hundred dollars a square foot. Even if you massage those numbers, it’s still a heavy multiple of a traditional industrial building, and these were built solely for data centers. If it’s in an urban area, those could be repurposed to some extent for pennies on the dollar. But what about these data centers in the middle of nowhere, in very rural areas, that were built for data centers? They’re going to have zero value. In fact, they might be a liability if it gets to the point where they’re no longer used. So that should be on more people’s radar, because anytime we overbuild, it always comes back to haunt us. If I look out with my very murky crystal ball, in ten to twenty years I think a lot of these buildings are going to be obsolete and unnecessary.
Chad’s point about purpose-built data centers and obsolescence risk is exactly the valuation puzzle we worked through in Valuing Chicago Data Centers and Adjacent Properties.
Gordon Lamphere: Even if data centers continue to be useful, I’d be very surprised, looking at Moore’s Law, if a data center built ten years in the past is still a useful asset. I’ll admit we’ve primarily only operated as third-party aid to contractors of data centers, so I haven’t spent a lot of time in the data center proper, but we talk to their contractors and look at site location. Things are changing so fast it would blow my mind if a data center built in 2024 is still relevant in 2034. I completely agree. In terms of that, let’s look forward. Ten years from now, what do you think will have changed the most about commercial real estate?
Chad Griffiths: I think there’s going to be a very large section of distribution space that goes vertical, and this opens up a number of other problems on the functional obsolescence side. But with retrieval systems and conveyor systems, I anticipate buildings will go vertical to take advantage of cubic footage, especially in areas where there’s not a lot of land available. There are systems being developed, or already in the works, where you can have a sixty-foot ceiling height with all automated retrieval systems that pick something off a rack without needing a manual person to drive a forklift to the limits of the forklift’s reach. It’s very expensive to do right now, but like everything, costs come down, and it’ll be a better option for a lot of companies. So I can see a lot of these dark warehouses where there’s really nobody working outside of maybe a few technicians. But vertical buildings, very high single-story buildings, and what happens to the older twenty-foot-ceiling buildings in comparison, that will be a challenge that needs to get figured out. If I were to guess, I think ultra-high ceilings in smaller-footprint buildings, but more cubic footage, will be one of the major trends coming forward.
Gordon Lamphere: With those ultra-high ceilings, one of the challenges we’ve seen, and you can maybe give more insight, is it requires extremely precise floor plans, floors have to be extremely flat, and a lot of power. Do you think we’re ready for that for many of our buildings in the market, or are we still a couple years away?
Chad Griffiths: The super-flat floors are here now, in terms of adding more load by taking it from a thirty or forty-foot building to call it an eighty-foot building. I’m not an engineer, so this is above my pay grade, but I think it would just involve more structural components to ensure it has a low enough tolerance to be considered that super-flat floor. That’s a challenge that’ll have to get worked out, and maybe someone listening who’s an engineer can tell me I’m an idiot for this, but I think it’s a solvable problem. The power is a massive issue. Unless we can somehow scale power, I can see power being a massive issue going forward, just having shortages. But maybe that can get offset with solar. That’s the main benefit I see with solar. I don’t think solar is actually green energy at all; I just think solar is more energy. If people can start shifting their mindset on that, without going too far down the tangent, I think solar is a very good additional energy source. So maybe we do need to see more of that. But you’re right, I see power being a massive constraint in the near future.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve had folks on recently to discuss reactors and hydrogen as a power source, and if you have any guests you’d recommend, that’s something we’re always open to. We’re always trying to learn more. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but some of my guests have some of them. Before we talk about additional guests, one question we love to bring up, because we have a lot of younger listeners under thirty learning their place in the industry: if you could travel back to the start of your career and give yourself one minute of advice, what would it be?
Chad Griffiths: I’d say double down on becoming an expert in your niche, not necessarily as quickly as you can, but as efficiently as you can. What I mean is, if you’re in industrial, fully understand everything about an industrial building and what the tenant needs, and really get a good understanding of that. That’s not as steep a learning curve as a lot of people think. You can do that by going through buildings, talking to experts, and listening to podcasts like yours. That’s one path I’d double down on. The second path is to double down on relationships. The more people you can have in your old-school Rolodex, the better, and follow up with them, not just meet them once and shelf it, but actually cultivate a relationship where you’re touching base periodically or going for lunch. Really build that relationship base so you not only have those people as a resource, but you get to learn the local market that much more intimately, because you can ask questions and get a pulse on your market by having all these personal relationships. If you combine being an expert in your niche with all these long-term relationships, that makes you unstoppable. But it’s work, and it’s unpaid work. You’re not getting paid to listen to a podcast or go for lunch with somebody; that’s all a front investment you have to make. But if someone really commits to it, they’ve positioned themselves for a very fruitful career.
Gordon Lamphere: The whole reason I started this podcast was just to learn more. I didn’t have the intention of getting clients, which ended up happening. I just wanted to learn, and one of the ways we learn the most is through the relationships we get on the podcast. Some have developed into great clients and great friendships, where I can call someone and they’ll pick up the phone and tell me how a hydrogen or nuclear reactor works. As part of that, we always ask our guests, because they’re the men and women in the arena who know a tremendous amount about their section of the industry: who’s the next guest we should have on the podcast?
Chad Griffiths: Brandon Turner.
Gordon Lamphere: All right.
Chad Griffiths: I don’t think he’ll agree to do it, because I invited him to be a guest on mine to roll out some of this story and clear the air, and I don’t think he’s going to do it. So I say that one purely facetiously. A real answer: Ron Rohde. I think Ron is very underappreciated in this industry. He’s a lawyer in Dallas and also an investor who’s done a number of very cool projects. He’s gotten very big into IOS, industrial outdoor storage, lately, to the point that I think he might be one of the biggest experts in North America on IOS right now, because he’s a student of the game, has a law background, and is an active investor himself. I think Ron is heavily underrated. I think he could easily be a commanding voice in our industry in the future. He’d be one guest I’d love to hear. I’d love to hear a deep dive into IOS on your show.
Gordon took Chad’s advice: Ron Rohde joined the show a few episodes later for exactly that deep dive into industrial outdoor storage, available on the Real Finds Podcast.
Gordon Lamphere: I’d love to have him on. As a fellow lawyer myself, I always love to pick at the mind of other JDs. Before we go, if somebody wants to learn more about you and your podcast, where’s the best spot to find you?
Chad Griffiths: I’m probably most active on Twitter, or X, right now. My handle is @chadgriffiths. Most of the time I post just industrial stuff. I did go on a tangent the last couple of days talking primarily about Brandon Turner, but I’ll go back to regularly scheduled programming very soon. My podcast is Industrial Advisors, and it’s on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube as well. That’s a great place to check out.
Gordon Lamphere: It’s a great podcast, I’m a daily listener, or at least whenever you drop episodes. Thank you so much, Chad. I really appreciate you coming on today, and we have to have you on in the future. Thanks again to Chad, we appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us get quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere, 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 industrial, warehouse, or data-center-adjacent 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.