The Real Finds Podcast, Episode 99: How Regional Brokers Beat the National Flags With Kurt and Stewart Jensen
A conversation between Gordon Lamphere, J.D. of Van Vlissingen and Co. and Kurt and Stewart Jensen, industrial brokers and SIORs at Kessinger Hunter and Company in Kansas City, who make up two-thirds of the Jensen team specializing in the Kansas City metro industrial market. Transcript edited for clarity. Where the recording did not clearly distinguish the two brothers, their remarks are attributed jointly.
Stewart Jensen: I think it’s as good a time as ever to be an independent and to be a regional broker, because relationships are probably more important than they’ve ever been. Anyone can get on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever you want to use and come up with some answers, but the frauds are starting to come out. It’s as important as ever to have the relationships in place. At the end of the day, we’re a service business. The technology is going to improve our knowledge, and maybe our prospecting and deal sourcing, but I’m not concerned that AI is going to come replace a broker.
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 Kurt and Stewart Jensen, two experienced industrial brokers and SIORs at Kessinger Hunter and Company in Kansas City. They make up two-thirds of the legendary Jensen team that specializes in the Kansas City metro industrial market. On the podcast, we take a deep dive into what’s really happening on the ground in the Midwest industrial market, why regional expertise still wins, and how they’re navigating the shifting tenant demands of today’s evolving markets. Thank you so much for hopping on today.
Stewart Jensen: Absolutely. Thanks for having us along. Happy to be here.
Gordon Lamphere: So what got you guys into the world of real estate?
Stewart Jensen: You want to go first? Well, my younger brother Kurt has a little bit of tenure on me here. I went down a different path initially. But to be blunt, we’ve been influenced by the world of real estate from a young age, with our old man Dan, who’s been in the business for forty years now. So we grew up around it. I spent a couple of my summer birthdays and some off-season baseball walking around some big box warehouses Dan was involved in at the time, playing long catch in some shell warehouse spaces. So we really grew up around it. Our dad Dan was certainly instrumental in introducing it to us, and then when Kurt started working with him, it only took a few years before I got the itch and thought, all right, I’ve got to jump into the family business as well. I’ve been doing it a handful of years now.
Gordon Lamphere: So I run a regional shop as well, and one of the things that makes regional shops different is a focus on regional expertise instead of globalized real estate portfolios. Do you think regional firms like ours can compete in a globalized world, or do you think we’re just going to go the way of the telephone operator?
Stewart Jensen: No way. That’s one of the things I think we’ve connected through, SIOR. Before the national conglomerates were owned by all the same individuals, SIOR was created to service that, and it still exists for that reason, in my opinion. With the regional players like ourselves, you get that best-in-region expertise, and through SIOR you can utilize the best in region in each market. I think we have a lot to offer the client at the end of the day when we really focus on a smaller breadth of property and a region. That doesn’t mean you can’t assist a client in a market on the West Coast, but you’re going to rely on a West Coast expert through SIOR, or maybe through another relationship in that market. So instead of being stuck working with the same corporate flag in that market who might not be as reputable, you get to work with an SIOR who’s going to be reputable every single time. We touched on this with a market report we did not too long ago: even some of those large operations that have all the resources, the data analytical teams sourcing market-wide data, there are still discrepancies across their numbers. There are a lot of nuances in our world, and being boots on the ground, there’s a feel for it being local and regional more than just numbers on a page. Anyone can dig into a database and find available product, but someone in LA trying to find available product in Kansas City without using a local broker who’s in tune with the market and knows what deals are being done, they’re almost better off just doing it themselves.
Kurt Jensen: To Stewart’s point, we started just this year showing that the big national flags can have great data. You can’t argue they have more dollars going toward data than we do. But you can also look and see that, hmm, one shop’s vacancy rate is two and a half percent lower than another shop’s, and they’re talking about the same market. That’s not to say one of them is wrong. It just shows how dynamic the industrial market is and why it’s important to have a reputable broker with boots on the ground. That’s something we’ve really leaned into, and we think it’s a real strength we bring to the table. It’s something that sometimes gets lost in the corporate layers you run into with some of the bigger flags.
Gordon Lamphere: I think that does get lost. My grandfather was a founding member of SIOR for the Chicagoland area, and he always perceived that the SIOR network would be an incredible opportunity for independent and regional firms like ours, doing a hundred-plus deals in our region a year but relatively small by global standards. We’re on pace to send more than a dozen deals nationally through the SIOR network. We’ll see how many of those complete, but it’s a huge asset for regional and independent firms, so I think it’s very underutilized. One of the greatest parts about it is that it’s truly independent. The SIORs are great, but some SIORs are better than others. I know that might not be the best thing to say, but it’s true. So we don’t have to be fixed within a certain brokerage; we can just send you to the right broker, which is a really nice asset. Speaking of nice assets, I think the Midwest industrial market has been a great place to deploy assets for at least the last ten years. What are you guys seeing right now in Missouri, the Kansas City market, and the greater metropolitan area?
Stewart Jensen: As far as bulk product goes, we’ve been fortunate. While demand slowed down in 2023 and the end of 2024, our development slowed down dramatically too, like a lot of markets, so we didn’t really feel an overbuilt market, which we were fortunate in. As demand has remained healthy, it wasn’t the crazy high demand we saw for a few years after the pandemic, but we’ve really seen organic build-to-suit expansions come back around, and our construction activity overall is back up dramatically. Looking at our year-end report, and depending on which firm or source you use, whether it’s one of the national flags or CoStar, there was every bit of ten million square feet, maybe even more, delivered in the market in 2025. But that was really all new build-to-suit deals. The larger footprint stuff, two hundred thousand square feet and up, has really been the 3PLs and manufacturers gobbling up that space. It is softer than it was. There’s more opportunity out there if you’re a tenant in that size range; it’s a lot more fun to rep a tenant in that size range right now than it maybe was three years ago, because there’s more opportunity to bring value in different ways. But when you go down in size, that organic twenty-to-a-hundred-thousand-square-foot user is very strong and very active in our market right now. We’ve had the benefit of working with a number of those clients, and that’s been keeping us busy. Small bay demand is still strong. There’s a little bit of a gap in pricing expectation between the institutional landlords and your local mom-and-pop groups.
Kurt Jensen: I’m doing all the talking. Stewart, what do you think?
Stewart Jensen: Kurt’s right, that’s where he and I locally have seen the healthiest activity, in that local user in the twenty-to-a-hundred-thousand-square-foot range. On the valuation side, while construction costs and sale prices have stabilized, construction costs are still expensive, and these existing buildings are holding a lot of value, because while it might look or feel a little overpriced, you still can’t build it for that today. Values are still strong, sellers are still getting good numbers, while a buyer still feels like they’re getting a pretty good deal. So we’ve seen a lot of sale activity here in the last six to twelve months as well.
Gordon Lamphere: What do you think is most different about what tenants are looking for right now versus a year or a couple of years ago? In the Chicagoland market, tenants are a lot pickier, and they have a right to be. They’re also looking for more optionality in terms of term. A lot of tenants are trying to kick the can down the road; they don’t know where the market’s headed, and they’re looking for those short one or two-year options if they can nab them. What are you seeing from occupiers and tenants in the Kansas City market?
Kurt Jensen: Somewhat similar. Optionality is a good way to describe it. A year ago there was certainly more hesitancy when looking at long-term versus short-term renewals. But we’ve been fortunate; there’s been some kicking the can down the road, asking for one or two years, but landlords have still had the ability to force the hand on that three-to-five-year term. While landlords are more motivated than they were a couple of years ago, there’s still strong enough demand that they’re not going to do a crazy deal for a three-year tenant. What I have noticed is that pricing is still very strong, but we’ve started to see a lot of TI. Landlords are having to spend a lot of tenant improvement dollars to get deals done. Previously a lot of these deals involved maybe a buck a square foot of TI, maybe two, and now it sure feels like all the deals getting done and all the comps we’ve seen have landlords spending three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten dollars a square foot in TI to get a five-year tenant in place. That moves the needle on the pricing and face rates we’re seeing. It’s an interesting nuance, a little different from what we saw three, four, five years ago.
Stewart Jensen: I’d second that. You’re seeing more landlords, even if they’re holding their face rate, offering more concessions, whether that’s free rent or TI. Landlords know there are generally more options out there, and it depends on variables like how long they’ve been holding it and the size of the spaces. We saw one deal in our market that sat for a while, a twenty-thousand-square-foot deal, and they ended up giving something like thirteen to fifteen months of rental abatement. They got a long-term deal, but they’re not collecting base rent for a year. So you’re seeing some things you don’t typically see in the way of landlord concessions.
Gordon Lamphere: We’re definitely seeing the market change from what we saw in 2020 through 2022 in Chicagoland as well. What is that typical occupier profile that’s really been booming? If you have a landlord looking to snag somebody, what does that profile look like?
Kurt Jensen: A lot of folks that are even two or three degrees removed from supplying or being hands-on involved with the data center world, a lot of mechanical and electrical type groups, fabricators, those types are doing well and have strong growth needs. We’re seeing a lot of manufacturing too, which is awesome, which I think we all saw on the horizon with the geopolitical dynamics of the last handful of years. Even with the tariffs, we’ve seen a lot of folks navigate those challenges and still plant their flag down.
Stewart Jensen: Manufacturing can be vague too. Some of those data center electricals or mechanicals are fabricating and assembling a whole completed item in their shop and then taking it to the job site, versus doing that work on site, which increases their efficiency but also increases their footprint and space needs. Sometimes that light assembly falls under light manufacturing depending on how it’s handled and processed. Between expanding current facilities, leasing new facilities, and prospective deals, some of the bigger mechanical shops in our market right now, just in 2026, the last three months really, have been taking down or actively looking for close to half a million square feet of fab space for that kind of work. Those three or four groups I’m thinking about probably already occupy 300,000 square feet in our market. So those groups are growing like crazy and can’t have enough square footage, and their electrical partners are similarly growing. That’s what’s been driving things. I do think there’s a lot of 3PL activity too, but I still think the processors, the assembly manufacturers and fabricators, those special-use groups, are growing more aggressively, at least from our perspective.
Gordon Lamphere: Many of those aggressive growers also have a pretty robust power demand. That’s something we’re seeing in the market, everything from cold storage to technically savvy modern manufacturers to e-commerce and the data center business. All of the above require an enormous amount of power, increasingly as AI drives many of the processes. They’re becoming increasingly clean, but they’re power hogs. What are you seeing in terms of trying to find buildings that might not be prepared for modern industrial space?
Kurt Jensen: On the electrical component, we’re pretty fortunate. Power is pretty cheap in Kansas City. I think that’s changing, but Evergy has really been a pretty good partner, and they dominate the KC market as a provider. There are a couple of others; Independence Power and Light is relevant on the east side of our market. We’ve been fortunate that power hasn’t caused too much of an issue. I was thinking about a building we have, an old Coca-Cola bottling plant. A client acquired it and is decommissioning it and repositioning the asset to bring it back to market. It doesn’t have modern clear height, it doesn’t have a modern truck court, you’re going to stick out onto the street, and the offices are older, though they can be cleaned up. But it’s got eleven thousand amps of power, and that existing there today is a differentiator. That type of building maybe would have been seen as a little riskier five or ten years ago, because power wasn’t as sexy or popular, but now a lot of folks understand that utility is extremely valuable. Maybe the right group that needs it doesn’t come along for six or twelve months, but when they do, they’re going to need it, and you’re going to stand out and be a priority.
Stewart Jensen: It’s a long-term hold. With the latest data center boom in our market and the demand for power scaling rapidly to multiple megawatts, Evergy, our primary utility provider, is getting inundated with power requests. There’s a lot more justification and proof you have to go through, and lead time to get it. So if a manufacturer came along and said they need eleven or twelve thousand amps of power, other buildings are going to have quite a runway to deliver that. Whereas in our building, it’s a differentiator; we’ve got it and it’s there. Our speed to market and access to that power is much more rapid, because now if you get into Evergy’s queue for more power, you’ve got to go through proof of concept and justify it all, and then there’s a roadmap to get there. For data center users talking megawatts, you’re talking multiple years to get Evergy to get power to that site. Obviously eleven thousand amps is a little different, but it’s still a big positive for that asset to have it in place versus trying to get it there for the need.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s still pretty robust power at the building. Overwhelmingly, we’ve seen it play out multiple times in our market where owners tell occupiers we’re taking to market, oh, this is really easy, we can easily do this. And it’s not our first rodeo, so we’ll tell our tenant, hey, why don’t we check with ComEd and understand what’s actually happening? People are sometimes blown away that it can take twelve months or more in the Chicagoland market, plus the substantial cost involved to beef up the infrastructure, and the lead time for transformers and things like that. It’s still very volatile, and you aren’t sure exactly what you’re working toward.
So one of the big issues that creates a huge power demand as well, and I know you’ve touched on it, is cold storage. Cold storage has been a huge regional industrial play in the Midwest. We’ve had people on the podcast who made a tremendous amount of money in it, and we’ve done plenty of deals, though nothing in comparison to some of our guests. What are you seeing with cold storage as an interesting play in the Midwest markets?
Kurt Jensen: Lack of supply, for sure. It’s a tough animal. Like you, it sounds like, we’d love to do more of it. We’ve dabbled, had our fair share of some cold storage stuff. When our market was white hot two, three, four years ago, we had a spec cold storage building built, about two hundred thousand square feet, up on the far north end of our market, a corner where until things were white hot post-pandemic I would never have guessed it would see that kind of speculative development. The building sat and sat. A lot of the incentives they negotiated up front with the local folks were related to it being a cold storage facility, and they ended up doing a dry warehouse deal instead. They had the shell ready to be cold storage, but it became a dry warehouse. Cold storage always has so much conversation around it, and I think the demand is very real, but when we get in with some of our clients, the margins there are tough. The biggest cold storage plays in our market were groups like Lineage and cold logistics operators doing large build-to-suits. Something unique about Kansas City is we have a lot of cave space, old limestone mines since repurposed. We probably have millions and millions of square feet of cold storage under the caves. But once you freeze it, you can’t thaw it or it will fall apart. Some of those spaces have been around a while and are pretty nasty, dirty, and dusty.
Kurt Jensen: So you get these food groups that want cold storage but can’t take advantage of it because of the quality of the space. The demand’s there. We have a group that, if there were fifty or a hundred thousand square feet of competitive cold storage today, they’d probably go lease it. But it doesn’t really exist right now.
Stewart Jensen: In that smaller threshold, twenty to fifty thousand, there are no options. It’s tough for folks who’d be forced into an above-ground cold storage facility to compete, because we have a lot of users in our market with subgrade cave space where the operating expenses are minimal; it keeps sixty, seventy degrees year round no matter what. So you don’t have the swings of summer. It’s almost like a cooler once you get it frozen down there. That’s an interesting dynamic in our market.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s totally different than ours. We definitely don’t have a cave system in Chicagoland, so our option is to go further out from the city and build, not go down. Particularly when liquid capital was a lot less expensive and you had a much higher liquidity situation in 2020, 2021, 2022, and early 2023, there was a lot of cold storage getting built. Now the margins are so slim, it’s so hard to do because the cost of construction is enormous. And if you have billions, you’re probably putting it into data centers right now, not cold storage. So it’s kind of the redheaded stepchild of the high-capital commercial real estate world. But if you look at vacancy, it’s still incredibly low in Chicagoland. It’s just second choice if you’ve got a lot of money.
Kurt Jensen: That’s a really good point, because a big reason the capital costs to justify it are difficult is that the data centers are taking precedent and gobbling up a lot of the similar mechanical components those folks need. And the last thing you want to do as a tenant is dump a bunch of capital into a landlord’s building, like we ran into with one client. You want to own it at some point. The Lineages of the world are doing pretty well with it, but there’s a cost barrier for some. You guys probably need a lot of cold storage up in Chicago with all the pizza dough and stuff you’re trying to store.
Gordon Lamphere: Yeah, and we’re lucky that we’re one day’s drive time for over fifty percent of the country, which is pretty unique. As a consequence, a lot of food is in Chicagoland; we’re the food and pharma capital in many ways for a huge portion of the United States. So you need a lot of controlled climates in buildings, but that doesn’t always mean that’s even our biggest play. Sometimes the most uncontrolled are also huge, so IOS is also huge in Chicagoland. What are you seeing in terms of the IOS world in the Missouri and Kansas markets?
Kurt Jensen: From a sheer industrial inventory standpoint, we certainly don’t have what you guys have. I should know off the top of my head, but I’d imagine you’re three, four, five times our inventory base, if not ten times.
Gordon Lamphere: We’re pretty large.
Kurt Jensen: So I don’t think we have quite the IOS need as far as trailer storage goes. But we do see a lot of yard space, and that’s actually been a buzzword and a marketing play for the last calendar year. A lot of the construction companies we work with, and some of the similar folks doing the fab work we’re talking about, a lot of their material can go outside, and nothing beats storing something outside versus paying to store it inside. There are certain municipalities in our market where we know that’s going to be more attainable than in other submarkets, where it’s like, okay, the city’s never going to allow that. Even if you find the piece of ground, it’s never going to be approved. I’m sure there are a few brokers in our market who would throw some deals in my face and say otherwise, but it’s a small fraction of what our industrial market has going on right now. In some markets you can be an IOS specialist and just with that niche there’s enough to feed families, but I don’t get that sense here in Kansas City.
This is the small-market, relationship-and-utility-driven edge that Ron Rohde described from the Texas IOS side in his own industrial outdoor storage deep dive on the Real Finds Podcast.
Stewart Jensen: Even with a great IOS site in our market, it’s not just going to get gobbled up. Especially if you want the premium pricing most institutional groups need, you’re going to have to find the perfect user right on their route, right where they need to be. And the municipalities have been so lucky the last few years with all the growth that they turn their nose up pretty easily these days. They’re not as motivated to let you go build a five-acre gravel yard with a fence; they want a nice concrete yard, a thousand trees around it, and a concrete wall. All the more reason that when we do get a great listing or find a great building offering, call it, an acre of secure outside storage, we’ll absolutely put a premium on that property, because it’s very difficult to find. It’s either grandfathered in or it’s a tricky animal, and that helps drive a premium at times. I’d almost argue it’s less its own product type in Kansas City and more of a strong utility, like heavy power. It’s a great commodity to have to get a premium for a good building. We don’t see a lot of freestanding IOS sites.
Gordon Lamphere: It’s been an interesting asset class for us. We have one listing that isn’t even a listing yet; it’ll be coming to market maybe this summer, and we already have a list of like six people who will tour it before we’ve even brought it to market. So in terms of wild things, I’m curious what you’ve seen in terms of capital and the reality of our current liquidity market. This will go out probably right around the start of quarter two; we’re sitting here at the end of quarter one, so if the world changes in a week or two, give them some grace. What are you seeing in terms of liquidity in your market, and how are you predicting that plays out on the ground?
Stewart Jensen: Rates have come down a little bit recently, and people have adjusted. Things are still penciling; you just have to account for certain aspects. I’d say there’s a lot of optimism, things are headed in a positive direction. Obviously the geopolitical dynamics have put a little concern and pause on what was probably a very positive narrative up until then, so there’s some concern that could throw things off course. Our old man Dan sometimes calls me the eternal optimist, which is ironic because I can be pretty negative sometimes. But in Kansas City we’ve been spoiled. We saw the high highs like everyone else in 2021 and 2022, but knock on wood, we’re historically a pretty steady market, so we don’t see the big swings. We do have more institutional players in our market than we ever have, which can be a cause for some of the bigger swings. I do think consumer spending has gotten squeezed a little, so that’s a dynamic I’m interested to see. There’s still a bit of a discrepancy in a lot of these small bay industrial sites, where institutional groups are used to rents having gone up thirty, forty, fifty percent and are holding firm on their price point, but then you have a truly strong local company that can’t justify it. So there are some gaps in that world. As far as lenders go, there’s a lot of optimism, at least locally. A group we’re working with right now is very bullish on where things are headed and wants to make moves now because of that.
Stewart Jensen: There was all that uncertainty barreling toward the 2024 election, and then in that first year it was okay, now we’re dealing with the tariffs, and then let’s get through the tariffs and things will settle down, and then now we’re in a conflict with Iran. There’s always going to be some geopolitical event going on. But like Kurt said, there’s optimism over the next couple of years that things are going to keep going the right way. Do you feel like you’ve seen that in Chicago? Have things kind of hit pause because of the last month or two?
Gordon Lamphere: It’s kind of crazy. We’re on track to do more deals than I’ve ever done before, but deals are going slower than I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve only been practicing as a broker for ten years, but that’s enough to have some idea, and we have folks on our team like Nick who’ve been doing it for forty years, and he says the same thing. He said the only other time he saw deals go this slow was 2009, when the world was reeling from the financial crisis, and there weren’t that many deals then. So it’s an odd time because of the uncertainty. That’s why we’re seeing optionality as the big thing with our clients. Everyone wants to kick the can down the road twenty-four months and see what the world’s like. So we’re seeing people pay a premium: hey, we’ll release for two years, but instead of a three percent increase let’s do five percent. People are doing all sorts of things to get optionality. Fear breeds opportunity, because you can get those additional percentages on your lease, or maybe less TI, all sorts of things as a landlord, and as a tenant, if you’re willing to sign that long-term lease, you can get really good deals right now.
Stewart Jensen: You can get twelve months free rent. I maybe fibbed a little earlier, but we did have one deal recently where we did a one-year extension for a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-square-foot tenant, and they practically paid an extra twenty-five or thirty percent in rent because of it. That’s an opportunity for the landlord: my bet is these guys aren’t moving this year anyway, and I’m going to collect a premium rent this year. So you can paint it both ways. It is a little confusing for Stewart and me, because we’re fortunate; we feel like we’ve arrived at the stage of our career where we’re busier than we’ve ever been. I’m just over ten years in myself. So sometimes it’s hard to tell, am I busier because we’re more established now and doing more deals, or because the market’s strong? There’s probably a little of both. But when I talk to our peers in our market, they have similar inclinations: deals are getting done on a slower timeline, they drag out, but deals are still getting done, and there’s a lot of opportunity for tenants out there. That’s something we’ve really been voicing: it’s a great time to be making long-term decisions if you’re comfortable with it. We just got off a call discussing a five-year or seven-year deal, purely over what kind of savings they could achieve to give them a couple extra years. If you’re comfortable with that business decision, there can be a lot of positives to locking that in.
Gordon Lamphere: We’re doing the same on a number of deals, and it’s an opportunity for folks. One of the big opportunities we have on this podcast is bringing on folks who are experts in areas outside our geographic zone or area of expertise. This is more of a geography-related difference today, but it gives you guys unique insight. One of the biggest things I’ll admit is that I don’t know everything, which is the whole reason we have this podcast. So what’s one thing the commercial industry isn’t talking about enough that we probably should be?
Kurt Jensen: Your comment on cold storage is interesting, because candidly that’s not talked about in our market at all. The vacancy factor of cold storage makes it seem like a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t there be more? You go build a hundred-thousand-square-foot freezer space today, and it’s still going to be a good functional freezer in ten years. You go build a data center today, and it might be obsolete in ten years.
Gordon Lamphere: Might be obsolete in five years.
Kurt Jensen: To your point. And there needs to be a solution in our market because there’s no product. Everyone loves talking about small bay and how there should be more of it, and it’s like, go try the back-of-the-napkin math and tell me why there’s not more of it. I’m so tired of seeing people talk about that on LinkedIn. But the cold storage angle, maybe I’m stealing that from you, is an interesting thing that’s getting lost behind the big brother of data center deals.
Stewart Jensen: The food industry is as prevalent as ever. It’s not going away; everybody needs to eat. We’re a unique market, and similar to Chicago, we can reach ninety-eight percent of the country within a day or two from Kansas City. So it is surprising there’s not more of that product readily available or marketable.
The data-center-obsolescence-versus-cold-storage-durability point the Jensens raise is the same theme Chad Griffiths explored in Commercial Real Estate Doomers, Gurus, And Industrial Opportunity, and the power-demand pressures behind it run through our conversation on Hydrogen, Data Centers, And The End Of Energy Poverty.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ll give you another hard question you might not have an answer on, because that’s the whole point of this podcast, to tackle hard things. And it’s always been an interesting view into the future. Ten years from now, what do you think will have changed the most about commercial real estate?
Kurt Jensen: Maybe I’m being naive. Obviously AI is the first and foremost thing that gets talked about. But I still think you see so many deals getting lost in the weeds, so many people missing the forest for the trees. Someone says, I got a great deal, and it’s like, well, if you look at X, Y, and Z, you actually didn’t. So I still think the fact that it’s such a private market matters. There’s CoStar, and I should be careful because I know they’re a big conglomerate, but CoStar’s data on a macro scale is very helpful, and yet their data at the granular level has real gaps, and I’m sure you feel the same way about your market and could point at certain things and laugh about how incorrect it is. There are so many nuances people bring to the table. I don’t think it’s going to change a whole lot. It will, don’t get me wrong, the dynamics are going to change, but I think it’s as good a time as ever to be an independent and a regional broker right now, because relationships are more important than they’ve ever been. Anyone can get on ChatGPT or Claude and come up with some answers, but the frauds are being caught. People are regurgitating AI info, and at a certain point you want someone actually putting their own thoughts into things. I think we’re almost going to swing back a little. You’ll still see efficiencies get better because of it, but it’s as important as ever to have the relationships in place.
Stewart Jensen: At the end of the day, we’re a service business, and the technology is going to improve things. It’ll improve our knowledge, maybe our prospecting and deal sourcing. But I’m not concerned that AI is going to replace a broker. There’s a human touch point, and these are significant decisions decision-makers are making for their companies, their well-being, their careers. I don’t think you’ll ever get the same level of comfort talking with a professional who is immersed in the world we’re in. Will things look a little different in ten years in how we go about our day to day? That’s likely going to be the case, and it’ll shift how we go about some things. But at the end of the day, it’s going to be the relationship that still drives everything home for the broker community. As long as decision-makers are human beings, they’re going to want to work with human beings, but human beings who have the great tools. So technology is an important piece. Someday human beings might not be the decision-maker, but until that time comes, that might be a little far-fetched.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s a little past even the Jetsons timeline. I’ll say this: I wouldn’t want to be a first-year broker at a big shop today, because I think there are a lot of back-office jobs that, if not being replaced, are being diminished significantly. But I think there’s a future for the human touch. I just don’t think it’s in the back office or data entry, and potentially even cold calling could take a substantial hit with the new systems. Not to say a warm call in the future won’t be truly valuable, but I think a lot of things will change.
Stewart Jensen: With the recent phone software updates, we’ve found firsthand it’s combating those cold calls; it’s harder to get somebody on the phone now than ever. I use it myself, admittedly, and hopefully I don’t upset a prospect or client someday by them going to my AI recording, but anyway.
Gordon Lamphere: It definitely is harder. We have a lot of younger brokers and investors who listen; a large portion of our audience is under thirty, not the majority, but a large portion. If you could give them one bit of advice in this day and age, what would it be?
Stewart Jensen: It’s kind of old, but go knock on doors, honestly. That’s how you meet someone who’s going to think of you, maybe in three, four, or five years. It’s hard for them to ignore your call if you’ve knocked on their door. We’re spoiled in industrial that we can do that, where our office peers can’t as easily. You might not get the decision-maker, but you probably get the person who reports to the decision-maker, and it can be a helpful channel. You never know what the receptionist at the door might divulge that you wouldn’t get over the phone. They might say, no, we’re good, our lease is up in two years, and okay, now you know their lease is up in two years.
Stewart Jensen: I’d add to that: find a couple of different networks of other professionals that don’t overlap a bunch, so you’re expanding your own professional network as much as possible. That’s what I’m trying to do, and Kurt’s done a good job of putting himself out there in his career. Over the last few years as I got into it, I thought, I need to invest into a couple of groups that don’t overlap with Kurt, since we’re running around as a team on things together. We want to expand that Venn diagram. That’s the other thing I love about coming from my old world in mechanical equipment sales that was niche to the real estate world: it could be the guy you’re sitting next to on the airplane, you never know who you’re talking to who says, I need some space.
Kurt Jensen: To your point, your personal brand is everything. We love Kessinger Hunter, but at the end of the day, people working with us are working with Kurt and Stewart. Some of the national firms, if you’re a younger person, might have more on the table for you to work on today, but I think there’s more opportunity to grow and evolve your personal brand at an independent shop. I really do. I still try to do it, but especially my first handful of years, it wasn’t even that important if they were truly a prospect; I tried to meet one new person every week, so I’d have fifty a year. I wanted to do fifty one-on-ones a year and just grow the network.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s all terrific advice. The only thing I’ve done differently is I make a lot fewer cold calls. A lot of my clients come in through our marketing and network, but overwhelmingly we’ve been very effective at building relationships. It’s a relationship-driven business, and probably half of the folks I’ve done deals with, the deals are two or three-year deals sometimes. You’re talking to somebody about releasing a space, buying something, or investing. There’s a guy who came in almost four years ago, a big finance guy, saying he wanted to make an investment. We were looking at buildings to build a portfolio for him, and we’ve only really started deploying capital in the last year. That’s been four years in the making. This is somebody we might deploy fifty million dollars of capital with over the next ten years, but it comes after a long period of educating somebody on the Chicagoland market. The whole idea that a machine is going to replace that would be surprising to me. It could happen, but surprising.
There’s one thing that doesn’t surprise me at all, and that’s that the men and women in the arena truly know who the other men and women in the arena are to talk to. So who’s the next person we should have on the podcast?
Stewart Jensen: We hosted the legendary Bob Knakal on ours last year.
Gordon Lamphere: I’d love to reach out to Bob. We’ve messaged each other a couple of times on Twitter, now X.
Stewart Jensen: He was very welcoming and personable, very receptive. We set it up with his assistant, and he showed up. I went up to him at an SIOR conference and said, this is what I’m doing, would love to have you on, and he said absolutely, reach out. Someone we actually might have on, because we have a podcast too, though not quite the followers you do, is Gordon Brothers. They’re doing some really interesting stuff. They touch a lot of the retail world; some of the big foreclosures, they’re helping provide solutions. They’re really not even a real estate company, more asset specialists, but their world evolves closely to the real estate world, the Dollar Generals that are liquidating and how they go about that. They’re a solution to a lot of hairy situations, and they have very interesting stories.
Gordon Lamphere: I’d love to have them on, and I’d love to have Bob on. If somebody wants to reach out to you guys and listen to your podcast, what’s the best way to get in touch, and what’s your podcast?
Stewart Jensen: The podcast just went from being On Aire with Team Jensen to On Aire with Kessinger Hunter. We’re getting company buy-in, so we can have some more office and other brokers on. Stewart and I are industrial focused one hundred percent, but on the podcast we’re trying to encourage more office brokers, retail brokers, and operators. To get a hold of us, it’s K Jensen or S Jensen at Kessinger Hunter dot com. Shoot us an email, give us a call. I promise if you leave a voicemail I’ll see it and get back to you; don’t let my AI bot run you off. You can find our cell phones if you Google our name and Kessinger Hunter. It’s On Aire with an E at the end of Aire; it stood for the Art of Industrial Real Estate. We’re going to keep the name even though the acronym won’t work as well with the new direction. We’re on your podcast apps, so you’ll see us there.
Gordon Lamphere: Stewart, Kurt, thank you very much for hopping on today. We have to have you guys on in the future. Thanks again to Kurt and Stewart. We truly appreciate their insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a follow, and a five-star review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions 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, the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Stewart Jensen: It was a lot of fun, Gordon.
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, cold storage, or IOS 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.