Optimizing Real Estate: Applying Alex Hormozi’s Strategies With Tim Calise, Real Finds Podcast #32 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 real estate and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we speak with Tim Calise. Tim is a successful investor, entrepreneur, and business consultant. We discuss real estate systems, improving the real estate business model, and investing in uncertain times. We also discuss wrapping up a successful $300 million hedge fund, and what it’s like working with one of the internet’s most famous entrepreneurs, Alex Hormozi. Tim, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.

Tim Calise: Pleasure to be here, Gordon. Thank you, and looking forward to the conversation.

Gordon Lamphere: Tell me a little about yourself. How did you get into business and this whole SaaS world?

Tim Calise: I was the kid who carried a briefcase to morning meeting in middle school, because I emulated the people I saw around me and it looked cool, probably to the chagrin of my two sisters. I always liked numbers, business, math, and the entrepreneurial stuff: finding a problem to solve, the lemonade stand, flipping hockey memorabilia on eBay. I started in the traditional stock brokerage business, and honestly it wasn’t for me, but I had great clients on the other end of the phone and kept thinking, how do I get on their side of this world? That introduced me, at twenty or twenty-one, to alternative investments and hedge funds, and we had a couple as clients. Being single and twenty-one with nothing better to do, I sold my worldly possessions, moved from the Northeast to the Southeast, and started a hedge fund. We were fortunate to raise over $300 million over the next couple of years, and then 2008 happened. We got out in advance of that, which was fortuitous. Then I spent the next ten years in fitness and technology, which led most recently to the executive team at Gym Launch alongside Alex and Leila Hormozi, which let me scratch the entrepreneurial itch on a new level. I’ve always had an itch to be artistic in the business-creative sense, and now I help up-and-coming entrepreneurs co-create the business and life they envision.

Hedge Funds and the Biggest Short

Gordon Lamphere: For some of our listeners, what really is a hedge fund, and what are alternative investments?

Tim Calise: Most people are familiar with traditional stocks and bonds. Hedge funds are a fun word for things outside that structure. For us, it meant a long-short equity hedge fund: we could buy stocks and bet the price would go up, and we could bet against companies and profit if the price went down. Call it a mutual fund that can take advantage of both the upside and the downside. Alternative investments include real estate, hedge funds, and now crypto and other things.

Gordon Lamphere: What was your biggest short, and what drove you into it?

Tim Calise: Good question, because I think about the time we just went through with COVID. Around 2006 or 2007, in China, everybody became a day trader, stay-at-home spouses filling their day with stock picking. China Mobile was the darling of the time, and I don’t remember the exact prices, but the equivalent went from a dollar to $300 within a couple of days. We said there’s no way this is sustainable. But there’s a saying in the investment community: the market can stay wrong longer than you can stay liquid. We saw it go from a dollar to $150 and said this is coming back to zero, and then it went to $200, $250, $300. You have to borrow stock to short it, and we had a paper loss in the millions until it came back down to earth. It ended up a seven- or eight-figure win, but we went through some significant stomach pain in the interim.

Living a Value-Driven Life

Gordon Lamphere: Sometimes it’s hard to find value when retail investors see something different. You talk a lot about living a value-driven life. I have a little one, and I’ve taken a step back in some regards, though I’m still working seventy or eighty hours some weeks. How did you come to that philosophy? So many in the hedge fund and entrepreneurial world have the total grindset mentality, which is very hard for a dad or mom to sustain and still be there for family.

Tim Calise: First, I recognize there are seasons to life. There are times when the situation requires you to dig in and not find the balance you ultimately want. But for me, the model started early. My dad was in finance and traveled a lot, and as a young person I said, if I could ever create the opportunity to have choice and options around my time, that’s something I’d really value. Early on I said I wanted to be retired at thirty or thirty-five, and I didn’t want to sit on a beach. I wanted optionality. I’ve gone through seasons. Gym Launch was a high-flying company, I believe the fastest-growing private company in the United States for a period, and you have to strike while the iron’s hot. But measured over decades and not days, I’ve always sought the ability to construct a life around my priorities. So instead of grinding for the sake of the grind, I selectively pick the areas where, when it’s a season to hunker down, it’s from a position of love and selectivity, not obligation. I can still coach my daughter’s lacrosse team and play golf with my son. I think that’s what most people want: control. People are willing to do the work when it’s aligned with their intentions and values, and the pendulum is swinging back toward people forcing those decisions.

Gordon Lamphere: How do people get to that level of control? I have investments and do quite well, but most of what I earn comes from my daily labor. How do you get from working an hourly wage to controlling your time?

Tim Calise: Two themes. One is leverage. When you’re an hourly or salaried worker, you can learn while you earn. If you want to create something in the future, you don’t have to quit your job, jump off the cliff, and build your wings on the way down. You can learn the skills piece by piece. If you want to start a business but don’t have sales skills, find a role where you become an expert salesperson, acquire the skills on someone else’s dime, earn some money, and once you have the skills you need, maybe it starts as a side project and becomes full time. Ask, what do I need to know to get where I want to go?

The second is time. Dan Martell, a great SaaS coach and multiple-time founder with multiple eight-figure exits, wrote a great book called Buy Back Your Time. The concept is that we as individuals do too much. A lot of folks in my circle are real estate agents, residential and commercial, building teams and trying to leverage their brand, but they haven’t found an executive assistant or a junior partner to take on responsibilities, so that when they choose to dedicate time, it’s highly leveraged time. So many people in the entrepreneurial community are still doing ten-dollar-an-hour tasks while trying to command a hundred, five hundred, a thousand dollars an hour. You have to be very clear about how you allocate your time.

The Time Audit and the Zone of Genius

Gordon Lamphere: That’s been a huge struggle for me. I’m commission driven, and I probably waste ten or twenty percent of my time on tasks I shouldn’t be doing. How do you identify those gaps in return on your time?

Tim Calise: The first thing I do with any company is a time audit. You have to slow down to go fast. Take a week, and every fifteen minutes, write down what you did. You start to identify patterns. I spent a lot of time in fitness, and any time somebody wants to change, the first thing is document: write down what you’re eating and doing. You become more mindful because you’re accountable to what’s on paper. Then, borrowing from Dan’s book, rank where you spend your time on three things: volume, whether you’re good at it, meaning whether it’s in your zone of genius, and whether it delivers value. Volume is just a multiplier. Find the things where you’re aligned with your zone of genius and high value, and immediately get rid of the things outside your zone of genius that deliver little value. A great mentor of mine says fear has no place on paper. The idea of “this is all in my head, what do I do” goes away when you put it down and tick away at it. You’d be amazed what you can achieve in a short time.

Gordon Lamphere: What is the zone of genius?

Tim Calise: For me it’s a combination of what feeds my energy and what I’m uniquely positioned to do. People think about time like a budget. I can spend my time in a lot of areas, but conversations like this feed me energetically. If I did this for eight, ten, twelve hours, I’d be as energized at the end as at the beginning. Have me do other things for even a minute and it zaps my energy. So I try to find the things that feed my energy and that I’m uniquely skilled at, and then bring in others who are really good at the rest. I spent over a decade doing things I felt I needed to do because I was the right guy for it, and in reality, when I gave those things to people whose zone of genius was that domain, it fed them energy and let them make a living.

Being a Connector

Gordon Lamphere: You talk about becoming a connector. Real estate and fundraising are hugely driven by connecting people of different walks of life. What tips would you give a broker or GP looking to fundraise?

Tim Calise: There’s a naive perspective that says I need to know everything. The reality is, if you knew everything, you’d need no one. So recognize you don’t need to know everything, and build a Rolodex. Your network is your net worth. Who do I want to know, and who do I need to know, to deliver the value I want to deliver? As a broker, it may serve you well to have connections in insurance and with CPAs. One of my clients is deeply in this world, thinking about moving impact from transactional to relational. You’re not just selling somebody a home or renting them an office. It means something in the context of their story. The house might be the home they’re trying to build. The office might be the first step in recognizing their little idea has grown into something. How can you be the connector who helps that person move toward their goal? When I bought my house, the agent did a phenomenal job and referred me to a painter. He asked what else I needed, noticed the grass, said he had a landscaping guy, then plumbing and HVAC. One connection introduced me to six others. It made me feel good because I didn’t have to play Yellow Pages roulette, and he became more valuable to me. He delivered value beyond paint on the walls. Think about how you can help somebody move closer to where they want to go, focused on the outcome, not the transaction.

Making the Ask

Gordon Lamphere: One of the biggest things a GP or broker struggles with is making the ask. To build a hedge fund in the hundreds of millions, you have to make a lot of big asks. How do you ask someone to fork over seven or eight figures?

Tim Calise: First, the laws of compounding and nonlinear growth apply here. We started with $100,000. You cannot go from being a $100,000 manager to asking for a $10 million allocation. Just like there are seasons in life, there are seasons in business. When you’re small, ask what your value proposition is and who will most resonate with where you are today. For us, that was high-net-worth individuals looking for a better place for their retirement assets. In the early 2000s, hedge funds were hot, like the Wild West, and managers had gotten big heads: you should be lucky to give me capital. That was the opposite of how I naively thought it should work. So I took the opposite approach. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you worked forty years to put this money together, and I’ll make you two promises. One, I’m never going to lose your money, at least big time. Two, you’ll always be able to reach me. I’m going to be hyper-communicative, and we’ll be protectors of what’s valuable to you. That’s how we went from $100,000 to $250,000 to a million, and the ball started rolling. At about $25 million, we went to small institutions, with allocations of one to two and a half million, since most have ten percent limits. That got us from $25 to $100 million. At $100 million, it was $10 to $25 million chunks. We got to $150 million and then raised another $150 million over the next six months. So if you’re a GP raising capital, understand your avatar and your unique selling proposition. Why you? If you can’t answer that in the context of what it means for the investor, go back to building the business, because that’s what you’re doing. What’s the story? What’s the value? And who has your core client? If I were raising for startups today, I’d think about who has startup relationships, who has capital that wants that, who’s had an exit, and I’d have a list of ten people to call. Know what business you’re in and who your ideal client avatar is.

Service Businesses and Building Systems

Gordon Lamphere: You’ve built a lot of service businesses, and real estate is ultimately a service business. What’s unique about the service industry, and how do you build and execute?

Tim Calise: Service businesses are aligned with who I am and the value I want to bring. Selling products is phenomenal, but it’s not my wheelhouse. I’m drawn to relationship-based commerce, which naturally leads to subscriptions and memberships, where you make one relationship sale and build over time by solving additional problems. Real estate agents and brokers are in the relationship business. Whether residential or commercial, it’s understanding why Mr. and Mrs. Smith are selling or buying and what their goals are. If you look at it as a transaction, you’re missing the point. Especially with AI and the internet, you have to deliver a value proposition that can’t easily be replaced. “I can source open houses in your area this week” is a dime a dozen. Understanding that Mrs. Smith cares deeply about her house and wants to downsize for specific reasons, now I can tend to those outcomes. Thinking in those terms unlocks the world for you and lets you be a connector. The more connected you are, the more valuable you are.

Gordon Lamphere: What are the biggest steps toward building systems in a service business? A lot of folks are looking at AI and virtual assistants.

Tim Calise: There are two types of systems: people systems and IT or automation systems, and you have to be clear how you integrate them. In the beginning, you start with pen and paper and design the process. We call it the 10-80-10 framework. The first ten percent is defining the problem or outcome. The eighty percent is production, carrying out the job. The last ten percent is quality assurance. Start with that framework and do it manually first. Say you need to send a list of upcoming open houses or available commercial buildings every week. In the beginning, you do a manual search: here’s how I do it, here are the sites, and at the end, does it look right and go to the right audience? Then ask how you can use tools, both people and technology, because if you’re the high earner, you shouldn’t be doing that work. Can I replace my time at a lower rate? Yes. Is it a people system or a technical system? Maybe both. Handwritten cards, for example. I’ve spent fifteen years sending handwritten cards to clients. In the beginning I did it because I wanted to write the scripts, then my team did it, and now you can do it online. Think about what you’re doing, how to pass it to someone else, what systems you need, and what your quality assurance method is. How do you know it’s working? And make one person the owner of every process. If it’s owned by multiple people, nobody owns it. Be clear who controls the process, because it shouldn’t be you.

Gordon Lamphere: What’s the number one way real estate companies are lacking in applying and reinventing systems?

Tim Calise: In general, and I’m not calling out anyone in particular, the industry is stuck in “this is how we do it.”

Gordon Lamphere: About half the industry would agree with you.

Tim Calise: If you look like everyone else, you’re not standing out. So how do you stand out? There’s a concept called creating a category of one, which I do with every portfolio company and client. What’s the virtual real estate that only we can define and be the only player in? As an agent, think about that. “I’m a residential real estate agent” looks like everyone else. “I’m an agent for military families with two kids looking to relocate” is niching down, and it’s super important, because if you’re for everyone, you’re for no one. Triangulate that against the value proposition you can offer that audience, and you move from being an agent to being a solution. Then build the systems to execute against that.

Gordon Lamphere: How does someone find their niche? There are so many.

Tim Calise: The concrete answer: take the universe and keep getting smaller until it feels uncomfortably small. “I’m for people named Gordon who live in the Midwest.” At some point you get to something you can put your arms around. That’s the short-term way to differentiate. Looking three, five, ten years out, I believe intention-based positioning is where things are going: this is the person I am, this is how I see the world, and if you identify with that, you’re my person. That’s more about brand and identity. It’s harder, less controlled, less tangible, and takes more time. So in some ways you go direct-response for a period while building up the brand.

ALAN and Lead Generation

Gordon Lamphere: Let’s discuss ALAN and SaaS lead generation. The real estate world has a lot to learn about lead generation. A lot of agents, brokers, and GPs are stuck in the past with country club networks, signs, or LoopNet and CoStar almost exclusively. Tell us about ALAN and the lead generation systems you built.

Tim Calise: ALAN was a portfolio company we built alongside Gym Launch, the consulting business, and Prestige Labs, the supplement business. Our core avatar from 2018 to 2020 was gym owners, primarily independent brick-and-mortar facilities. First we gave them a better business model, then products to sell, and then we tackled lead generation. If you talk to any business owner, more than ninety percent will say, I need more leads. You might be thinking that right now. In fitness, it was eleven times out of ten. But the reality was that only one out of six inquiries was nurtured properly and ever showed up for an appointment. You’re burning eighty percent of your ad spend because you don’t have a system to create value from those people. We started with training on how to nurture, but John at the front desk isn’t nurturing leads the way you want. So we built ALAN, a machine-learning-driven lead nurture platform. Somebody submits a form on your website or Facebook: first name, last name, email, phone. We knew with a high degree of confidence how to turn that raw material into a person walking through the door. We turned the conversation from “you need more leads” to “you need more shows,” which is very different, and we doubled or tripled the efficiency of that process, which increased the value of gyms.

Then, going into Q1 2020, COVID hit, and we quickly pivoted ALAN to get potential gym members to an online assessment on Zoom. We did it successfully, and it took about another day to look at each other and say, we can now take an online lead to a virtual consultation. We’re not limited to gyms. So we expanded ALAN into about thirty industries with similar problems: service businesses with subscription or membership models. For real estate: how you nurture leads is the start of the relationship. How somebody enters your world determines how long they stay. Do you have data around your nurturing process? Set goals, and do things differently, because if everybody has the same problem, don’t follow the pack. I’ll give you the answer: speed of response is number one. A hot lead is dying by the minute. The faster you get to them, the more likely you are to convert. Second is scheduling. Our data showed you had about seventy hours from opt-in to completing the appointment, or the likelihood of monetizing that lead dropped substantially.

Gordon Lamphere: That’s not surprising. When I took over our sales processes around 2018, three things made about a fifty percent improvement. We set up a CRM with follow-up schedules; before, we followed up once, and we moved to three times, because people are hesitant on a large asset like commercial real estate. And the biggest: whenever a lead comes in, our whole brokerage team gets a text with the lead information to call immediately. We usually call within five minutes, which beats industry standards, and our buildings are far better leased than industry standards as a result.

Working With Alex Hormozi

Gordon Lamphere: What I’m most curious about, and I think our listeners are too, is your relationship with Alex Hormozi. How did you meet?

Tim Calise: From 2010 to 2018, my wife and I developed a multi-unit, seven-figure gym business under an existing franchise, and in 2018 I took ownership of the parent company. As a franchisee, I’d become aware of Gym Launch and their consulting offering. Another franchisee had reached out to Alex, and the message got around that this is someone you should talk to. So I started as a client, wanted access to the consulting and licensing information, implemented the fundamentals, and was pleased with the results. In 2019, Gym Launch launched Prestige Labs, and in January they had a launch sales competition where the top ten got a trip to Austin to meet Alex and Leila. We were in the top five, so I flew down. At their dining table, nine people plus me went around and said, here’s my biggest impediment, let’s solve it. I was toward the end, and I said, honestly, I don’t have anything, because I don’t really want to own gyms. I want to do something else. Alex said, you’re right, after two days of talking to you, you probably should. You’re in the wrong vehicle. So I sold my gyms. But I still owned the franchise, and I called him and said, I loved everything I heard, and I want to tell the other gym owners in my system to use your IP, but instead of ripping you off, do you want to do a JV? He appreciated that. A couple of months later, he called and said they were looking for someone to come on as head of business development with some finance function to get the businesses running more efficiently. I joined in mid-2019, and that was the big year. We went from ten or twelve million in 2018 to over $35 million in revenue in 2019. Then we built ALAN at the end of 2019 into 2020 and ran it for a period. In late 2021, we exited all three businesses, selling the majority to a private equity firm out of the Northwest.

Gordon Lamphere: You and Alex have very different mindsets about valuing your time and your end goal. You’re more return-on-investment and family time and a value-driven life; he’s more grindset and make a tremendous amount of money. Was there conflict, or was it an equitable relationship?

Tim Calise: Good question. I knew going in that this would be a season of investment of time and effort, so I had no false pretenses. Alex is someone who redefined for me what leverage, output, and speed mean. I thought I could multitask and work fast in quickly evolving businesses. This was that at light speed. I took a lot of lessons. Leila is one of the best operators I’ve ever met, phenomenal at people systems. Alex is phenomenal at taking an existing idea that’s doing well, tweaking it, optimizing it, and scaling it. My zone of genius is the smaller end. Part of that is coming up as an entrepreneur; I still carry David-versus-Goliath feelings. I have a podcast called Leveling the Field. I clearly remember lying in bed thinking the world was going to end because we were underperforming and burning cash, my wife sleeping next to me, thinking, she doesn’t even know what we might be facing. That feeling stuck with me. It doesn’t excite me as much to scale a company from ten to a hundred million as it does to help the person at $250K, $500K, a million, who’s sitting on a $10 million idea but whose viewpoint is myopic, and not in a negative way, they’re just hammering through. My website headline is “I make founders’ dreams come true.” I’ve been number two to multiple people on their way to being billionaires, and I take that number-two position as a process of co-creation. I don’t need the spotlight. How can I make you look good and get where you want to go?

Gordon Lamphere: I couldn’t agree more that taking a business from zero to ten is more exciting than ten to a hundred, even if the rewards from ten to a hundred are sometimes greater.

Tim Calise: If you set out to build a billion-dollar business, you probably won’t. Start building a $10 million business and be pleasantly surprised when you get there, and then figure out how to take it further. Culturally right now, if you’re not buying the jet at twenty-two and retiring at twenty-three, you’re a failure, and I fundamentally disagree with that paradigm. You also have to know what you want. I love Alex. He’s said, I want to do something no one else has been able to do, and to do that I have to do things no one else is willing to do. I align with that a hundred percent. My vision is just that being a billionaire doesn’t change my outcome.

Gordon Lamphere: A good friend of mine was in the same fraternity as Alex at Vanderbilt, and before this interview I sat down with him for half an hour to get a heads-up. He said Alex really is that way and always was, a gym rat who wanted to build a billion-dollar business from the start. I take more of the Nick Huber mentality: build boring businesses, have a well-leveraged life, and have peace at the end of the day. To each their own.

Giving Back a $300 Million Fund

Gordon Lamphere: One aspect of your career I found fascinating is how you dealt with uncertain times in the hedge fund industry. Not everybody gives the money back. You did in 2007, and there’s a lot of incentive to keep riding the wave and collecting fees. How did you anticipate and deal with uncertainty, and what motivates someone to give back $300 million?

Tim Calise: We started in 2003, and by mid-2007 we had over $325 million of unlevered capital. In October 2007, we made a judgment call: we’re taking the fund to cash, because things are about to get ugly. Our investors basically said, you’ve lost your touch, we want our money back, and others said they could manage through the environment, and some probably went off the cliff at a hundred miles an hour. Two things. One, we were very clear on our mandate and our process, and personally and professionally, things go wrong when you go outside your zone. We had a specific way of seeing the world that worked from 2003 to 2007, and our commentary at the time was, this is what a normal functioning market looks like, and this is not that. Interest rates were low. Ben Bernanke had just said Alt-A defaults would be contained. The world was supposedly fine. It wasn’t. The cover of the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2007 posted a rumor that Apple was going to be bought out in a leveraged buyout by a PE firm for something like $300 billion. The most ridiculous, never-going-to-happen headline, but the stock shot up. We realized we couldn’t compete in that. So in any uncertain time, stick to your knitting. Warren Buffett is the obvious example. What’s your time frame? If you need to win today and need to go outside your belief system to do it, ask yourself some serious questions. We’re in uncertain times right now. Keep asking what a normal functioning market looks like for your business, and be aware of when things start to turn, because you’ll hear a lot of noise. But remember, fortunes are made in times of trouble.

The Final Four

Gordon Lamphere: We’re certainly not in a normal market, unless you’re one of the bears who thinks we are. Let’s get to our Final Four. What do you see for the service industry and systems over the next ten years, with AI, variable interest rates, and a changing demographic?

Tim Calise: Right now we’re in the attention economy, and the pendulum is starting to swing back. Very soon the tide is going to go out and we’ll see who’s wearing a bathing suit. There’s going to be a flushing of the market, because the easy money across a number of sectors has already been made. If you watch Million Dollar Listing on Bravo and think you’ll become an agent because it’s easy to sell fifty-million-dollar properties and be Ryan Serhant, that’s not reality, and you’ll get a rude awakening. Because of that, we’ll reorient around intention and identity, and I believe brand will be the most important thing going forward. Ryan Reynolds going from actor to business mogul isn’t by accident; people identify with him and he’s using his fame to become a bigger brand. Think about what brand you want to create and what narrative you want out there, because it’ll take five-plus years to get to where you can trade on it.

Gordon Lamphere: All of us wish we had the brand of Ryan Reynolds or Alex Hormozi.

Tim Calise: Alex did it in eighteen months. Nobody knew who he was two years ago. I remember sitting in his house making those grainy YouTube videos. It was function over form. You just have to start somewhere. Your point of view on life and business, who you are and what makes you tick, is valuable. You have to figure out your voice, and it’ll take a couple of years.

Gordon Lamphere: With Alex, was it finding that unique element and leaning into it, or was it systems, digging into the algorithm, or both?

Tim Calise: A combination. Alex hit it at the right time because he’s a walking, talking pattern interrupt. In the attention economy, you have a guy who looks like a lumberjack, is smarter than ninety-five percent of PE firms and investors, and is incredibly dynamic and driven. Then he took the traction and capital he had to buy access and insights into the algorithm. MrBeast does the same thing; there are groups that know how to do this systemically. It’s who you need to know, not what, because it’s ever changing. He built a media team that’s the best of the best, and that let him leverage his raw material. His recent book launch to 650,000 people wasn’t by accident. That was years in the making.

Gordon Lamphere: Business is the iceberg model, ten percent you see and ninety percent below the water. What advice would you give young Tim out of high school?

Tim Calise: It would be simple: there is no right way. We’re only limited by our options, and our options are only limited by our imagination. When I was younger, I didn’t dream big enough. Your dream should scare you. Dream big and don’t settle. I was probably more insecure than I’d care to admit, which is natural, but insecurity makes you lower the bar until it feels good. I’d fight as hard as I could to keep the bar high.

Gordon Lamphere: Is there a book you’d recommend?

Tim Calise: If you’re entrepreneurial, Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson, which I read once or twice a year, and Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. And Alex’s books, $100M Offers and $100M Leads, are basically free and are a masterclass.

Gordon Lamphere: Before we go, the whole reason for the podcast: who should we bring on next?

Tim Calise: One person I follow and am close to is Sharran Srivatsaa, president of Real Brokerage, probably one of the most forward-thinking people in real estate. Follow all his content. He took a real estate business in California from $100 million to exiting for over $3 billion a couple of years ago. It’ll be to your detriment not to have him in your sphere in some way.

Gordon Lamphere: That’s a great get, and we’ll reach out to you for contact information. One more question: what’s the best way for folks to get in contact with you?

Tim Calise: My website is timcalise.com, C-A-L-I-S-E. I’m on Instagram and LinkedIn primarily, and I monitor all my own messages. Even though I have systems, reach out, say you listened to the show, and I’ll take great care of you.

Gordon Lamphere: Tim, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.

Tim Calise: Looking forward to it. Thank you, Gordon. I greatly appreciate it.

Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Tim. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a follow, and a review. Your interactions and subscriptions truly matter and help us provide quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or 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.