The Midwest Rebalance: Industrial Winners and Losers With Xander Snyder – RFP 81 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:04): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we explore the state of industrial real estate with Xander Snyder. Xander is the senior commercial real estate economist at First American. On the podcast, we take a deep dive into the Midwest industrial market, including sales, leasing, and capital markets. Most of all, we dive below the surface of the data as he uncovers the good, the bad, and the ugly of hidden distress and opportunity for investors. If you’re evaluating Midwest real estate assets, this podcast is well worth a listen. Xander, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Xander Snyder (00:59): Pleasure to be here, Gordon. Thanks for having me.
A Data-Driven Path Into Real Estate
Gordon Lamphere (01:02): So why real estate?
Xander Snyder (01:06): Real estate. That’s a very broad, general question. My background in real estate, or why real estate generally?
Gordon Lamphere (01:16): What got you into real estate?
Xander Snyder (01:19): I come originally from a family office direction. My family has been investing in real estate in LA for the last fifty years, and I’ve been investing directly for the last fifteen years myself, either through direct ownership or as a limited partner. Essentially, I wanted to go back to grad school and combine some technical expertise with the domain expertise I have, and that’s how I got to where I am. I think it’s a great industry to apply new technology to. We tend to adopt new technology a little on the slow side, so I like taking a data-driven approach to the commercial real estate world.
The Industrial Supply Wave
Gordon Lamphere (02:00): So let’s get into the data. What are we seeing in the industrial market right now? We’re seeing certain things in the Chicago market from our perspective. What are you seeing?
Xander Snyder (02:14): Maybe we can start at a high level and then drill down into some of the larger markets in the Midwest. For folks who aren’t familiar, we just had a huge boom in industrial construction over the last several years. I guess your audience is probably already familiar with this, right?
Gordon Lamphere (02:30): If you’ve ever driven a car anywhere for more than a mile, you’ve probably seen an industrial facility being built somewhere.
Xander Snyder (02:38): I think that’s right. There’s a lot of new supply. It was driven by a combination of a surge in demand during the pandemic and very low construction financing costs. As a result, we hit an all-time high in new industrial construction in the third quarter of 2022, at around seven to eight hundred million square feet under construction across the country, depending on the source you use. Since then, that supply has been delivered to market, and as that’s happened, new construction starts have fallen.
So I’d say we’re in a bit of a rebalancing phase right now, because demand has fallen off for a number of reasons. It’s become a little softer, even though I think the long-term demand drivers for industrial are still quite strong. So we’re dealing with this supply wave now, even though we know future supply will be at least somewhat limited.
In the Midwest, if we just focus on the five largest markets, and I’m ranking these not by population but by stock of industrial square footage, it’s Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Columbus. The characteristics of the new industrial space that’s been added have varied a little, and as a result, the stock of industrial space in those cities has changed over the last five years compared to pre-pandemic, and each has changed a little differently. I think the characteristics of that stock are something interesting we can get into. But I’ll pause there and say that broadly, these markets have followed the national market.
The Rise of Big-Box Construction
Gordon Lamphere (04:19): So what are the biggest changes in characteristics? I’m guessing, from the data I see, that we’re seeing a lot more large-box construction. Would that be accurate?
Xander Snyder (04:31): Yes, absolutely. There’s been far more large-box construction across these five markets over the last several years compared to small box. It’s varied even among these five major cities. For example, if you look at the average industrial building size delivered over the last several years, it got to be the largest in Indianapolis, where on average three hundred fifty thousand square foot buildings were being delivered toward the end of 2023. Columbus came in second at about three hundred thousand at its peak, followed by Chicago at about two hundred fifty thousand square feet, followed by Detroit, and then Minneapolis was on the low side. Even though Minneapolis saw an increase in the average size of properties delivered, it didn’t increase by a whole lot. In fact, right now, properties being delivered in Minneapolis are roughly on par with the average size of industrial properties pre-pandemic. Detroit saw more of a spike and an immediate pullback in average building size delivered.
Gordon Lamphere (05:45): Why do you think certain markets had massive spikes relative to other markets?
Xander Snyder (05:52): A lot of it has to do with local incentives, but also with where these cities are positioned on major logistics and distribution lines. Everyone always says that in real estate it’s location, location, location. When it comes to industrial properties, the location needs to be along the main arteries of transportation and moving goods, so that will affect the types and sizes of properties built in these different cities.
Then, of course, there’s a lot of diversification within industrial as a broader asset class. A lot of folks are probably most familiar right now with warehouses and logistics centers with 50 bays where trucks pull up to deliver goods into a warehouse or take them out. But there are also manufacturing facilities. If you look at the stock of industrial properties in Detroit, it’s overweighted toward manufacturing compared to, for example, Indianapolis and Columbus, where it’s overweighted toward warehouses and 3PL facilities.
Interestingly, the average size of properties in Detroit, even though deliveries grew over the last several years, hasn’t grown by all that much compared to Columbus and Indianapolis. The average building size in Detroit has only grown by about two percent, compared to Columbus and Indianapolis, where it’s grown inventory-wide by about thirty percent over the last several years. That gives you a sense of the relative change in the size of the average industrial property in these cities.
Who Is Absorbing the Supply
Gordon Lamphere (07:32): So which of these markets are absorbing the supply well, and which markets are lagging?
Xander Snyder (07:41): Let’s expand to the top ten markets, just so we have a bit bigger sample. I’d say there are four different groups of cities where new supply is or isn’t being absorbed at different paces.
In the first group, current absorption is outpacing deliveries by a fairly substantial amount. This category includes Dayton, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; and St. Louis, Missouri.
In group two are cities where demand is just beginning to balance out against supply. There was a bit of a supply wave, and now demand has just started to catch back up to it, but it’s not necessarily exceeding new supply at a rapid rate. Cities in this category include Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Minneapolis.
Group three is cities where new deliveries are substantially outpacing absorption, so new supply is higher than new demand. This includes Columbus, Ohio; Detroit; and Toledo, Ohio.
And lastly, group four is markets where supply and demand were previously in balance, but now they’re falling out of balance a little bit. For example, in Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, you had balance, but now supply is outpacing demand. So they’ve kind of fallen out.
What Drives the Differences
Gordon Lamphere (09:28): What’s primarily driving all this? Is it labor pools? The nature of the industries, logistics versus manufacturing? Are there incentives at play?
Xander Snyder (09:45): When it comes to industrial demand, and here I’m measuring it by rent growth, so demand for the space from the landlord’s perspective, there’s a very strong correlation between the availability of industrial labor, the labor supply in a given area, and industrial rent growth. You have to have the skills available in your local market to justify construction, and you justify construction with historical positive rent growth. So that’s been a major factor.
In terms of the amount of supply that’s come to market, I think it’s a combination of what we were just talking about: first, where these cities sit on major transportation arteries across the country. Second, local incentives, because those varied substantially over the last several years in terms of what municipalities encouraged and what incentives existed to encourage construction. And lastly, what types of properties make sense to build in each place. That comes back to the labor pool. You can imagine that manufacturing skills are substantially different from logistics skills. If a lot of people in a given city have experience working in a warehouse, that’s not the same as working at a steel manufacturer. All of these things combine to drive supply and demand in each of these cities.
Vacancy by Building Size
Gordon Lamphere (11:21): Within the product types, is there a wide variance in vacancy by building size? Are there certain markets with relatively limited small-bay, mid-bay, or big-box supply, and how is that playing out market by market?
Xander Snyder (11:42): It’s a great question. For the sake of argument, let’s say that below fifty thousand square feet counts as small bay, fifty to two hundred thousand is mid bay, and above two hundred thousand is large bay, or large box. One trend that’s actually shared across all of these major Midwestern metros is that large-box vacancies are much higher right now than small-box vacancies.
I actually have the top five in a chart already. Across the top five Midwestern metros by size of industrial inventory, large-bay vacancy rates are at about seven percent right now, and they peaked at about eight and a half percent. That’s properties above two hundred thousand square feet. The mid-bay vacancy rate is at about five percent right now, so meaningfully lower. And small bay is only at around three percent.
So there’s really a bit of a mismatch right now between demand for large properties and small properties, and I think a number of interesting trends are driving that disparity. One is that, as we talked about, most of the major new construction has been heavily weighted toward very large properties. Most of the new properties are big, tall-ceiling buildings where you can store a lot of goods and consolidate a lot of your operations. The challenge is that you have to be a tenant of a certain size to need a 500,000 square foot warehouse, which limits your demand base for that type of space. Smaller properties may be a little older on average. They might not have the high ceilings or all the modern amenities.
Xander Snyder (13:42): But in absolute dollars, they don’t cost as much to lease, so you have a broader prospective tenant pool to draw from. In addition to that mismatch in tenant pools, over the last year or so, especially as uncertainty around trade policy has been introduced, which affects where exactly we’ll need all of these transportation nodes across the country, a lot of big industrial tenants have been in a wait-and-see holding pattern. As a result, they’ve either been consolidating operations into fewer buildings or deciding to hold off on major leasing decisions. A 500,000 square foot warehouse costs a lot to lease. If that’s a big financial decision and you don’t know exactly where your operations will be needed in the next three to four years, you’re more likely to press pause.
As a result of that dynamic, we actually saw net absorption for industrial space across the country turn negative in the second quarter of 2025 for the first time in fifteen years, which means more space was vacated than leased. So you have all these different dynamics affecting the variability in vacancy rates between small and big boxes.
Developers Pull Back on Spec
Gordon Lamphere (14:59): Within our Illinois and Wisconsin portfolio, we’ve seen a lot of companies pressing for one- and two-year renewals where they typically did fives and tens, so that’s not wildly different from what you’re seeing. In terms of that rebalancing, what do you see in the construction pipeline and the product set to come to market? Are developers looking at the vacancy in certain parts of the Midwest and saying, “Maybe we won’t bring product online here”? Or are people going full steam ahead, betting on five or ten years down the line?
Xander Snyder (15:49): I think builders are becoming a lot more cautious and circumspect, especially when it comes to speculative deliveries, meaning a property delivered without a tenant in place. Over the last year or two, about sixty to seventy percent of new industrial supply, depending on the market, has been spec space. The remaining thirty to forty percent is build-to-suit, where a tenant has specific needs and the developer builds around them.
Developers are backing off spec space a bit, especially in high-supply areas. Eastern Indianapolis, for example, has received a lot of new supply over the last two to three years, and builders are getting more cautious about adding to it, especially because industrial vacancy there is already around ten percent. So I think we’re seeing starts fall, a gradual risk-off transition to more build-to-suit space among developers that are active right now, and general caution about delivering a big new empty box in a market that may already be oversupplied, at least in the near to medium term.
The Small-Bay Opportunity
Gordon Lamphere (17:08): In the near to medium term, it would seem that the most profitable section of the market is probably small bay. What are you seeing in terms of opportunities developers are looking at, or in the market generally, for investors who might be looking to get into the small-bay space?
Xander Snyder (17:33): I think there is a bit of an opportunity here. If you’re a tenant, you think about the size of your box and the amenities. As we said, newer, highly amenitized buildings have typically been larger buildings, while smaller bays are typically older buildings that have been around for a while. Because of that mismatch, and the smaller demand pool for very large buildings, I think there’s an opportunity for small-bay developers to offer new, upgraded inventory that can compete better with existing small-bay properties while offering more amenities at a given size. So I imagine we’ll see some construction activity pivot in that direction in the next year to 18 months, unless some of the uncertainty in the broader macroeconomy settles and we get a better long-term view of where demand for very large industrial space will be five years from now.
Gordon Lamphere (18:40): Are we seeing particularly strong rent growth in that section of the market? One of the biggest things I hear on the phone with the investors we work with is that they still feel rent growth in, for example, the Chicago market is lagging relative to the cost of construction. What are you seeing across the broader Midwest?
Xander Snyder (19:01): I don’t have the rent growth numbers at the top of my head right now. But as you can imagine, there’s a fairly strong correlation between vacancy rates and rent growth. Where vacancy is lower, rent growth is typically higher, because there’s less space to go around. Given that small-bay vacancy is so much lower right now, and small bays are dealing less with the onslaught of new supply, rent growth is probably going to be a good deal more resilient in smaller boxes in the years to come.
The trade-off, of course, is that smaller bays tend on average to be a little older. I think in the years to come, it will depend in large part on how much certainty we can achieve over the next five years, if you want to call that long term, around the macroeconomic policy uncertainty that remains outstanding. But given the limited availability of small-bay space, I imagine rent growth there will be more resilient than in the large-box segment.
Cap Rates and the Return of Positive Leverage
Gordon Lamphere (20:13): Speaking of resiliency, the industrial market has generally been pretty resilient for investors. What are investors seeing right now in terms of cap rate spreads, and how are they underwriting deals?
Xander Snyder (20:29): Cap rates for industrial properties have increased fairly substantially from the trough reached around 2022, by about 150 to 170 basis points nationwide. So you have some positive spreads in industrial right now, depending on the type of debt capital you can access. That’s positive. It also means, of course, that valuations are adjusting and will continue to adjust, especially as this vacancy overhang is worked out over the next several years.
We’re seeing more concessions offered to prospective tenants, especially in large box. If you’re a developer who just delivered a lot of new spec space and you’re uncertain where the demand will come from, it’s better to take a little bit of a cut up front to offload that risk and move on to the next thing. So one of the major trends right now is rent becoming a little softer on the large-bay side of the market, delivered through build-out incentives, lease concessions, and so on.
The positive, as you mentioned, is that we’re re-entering positive leverage territory. Over the last several years, almost any debt you could take out was going to cost more than your cap rate. So that will likely bring a lot of purchase demand back to the market, even with this vacancy overhang.
How Far Along Each Market Is
Gordon Lamphere (22:09): How does that break down market by market? Are there certain Midwest markets that are overachievers and others that are underachievers?
Xander Snyder (22:18): I don’t have market-level spread data for cap rates versus mortgage debt at the top of my head. But what I can say is that we can get a sense of how far along the top five and top ten Midwestern markets are toward stabilizing. We talked at the start of this episode about the rebalancing between new supply and softening demand. Ultimately, there are a lot of long-term drivers of industrial demand. I mention that because ten years down the road, I think we’re going to need more industrial space than we currently have. That’s the long-term trend, even though there may be disruption in the medium term.
You can get a sense of how far along these Midwestern markets are in the rebalancing process by looking at the spread between availability rates and vacancy rates. Vacancy is essentially a measure of how empty space is right now. Availability is more forward-looking, because it includes space that may be occupied now but is listed and will be on the market for lease in the near future. When the availability rate is much higher than the vacancy rate, that suggests the market isn’t very far along in rebalancing, and vacancy will probably rise toward the availability rate.
Among the top five markets by quantity of industrial space, Chicago is in first place. There, the availability rate is about eight and a half to nine percent, and the vacancy rate is only six percent. That’s a meaningful spread, which suggests Chicago’s rebalancing isn’t all that far along, and there’s more to come. Detroit has a smaller spread, but availability is still above vacancy. When you get to Indianapolis and Columbus, interestingly, even though they had some of the greatest growth in industrial stock over the last five years, with their industrial base growing by over 20% compared to the fourth quarter of 2019, which is pretty substantial, the spread between availability and vacancy is very narrow.
Xander Snyder (24:41): In fact, they’re almost right on top of each other, which suggests those markets are probably closer to fully rebalanced. So a lot of the pain has probably already been felt in Indianapolis and Columbus compared to, say, Chicago.
IOS, Cold Storage, and Data Centers
Gordon Lamphere (24:56): Within all these industrial markets, there are huge gaps between the different asset classes within industrial. Taking a dive into asset classes like IOS, cold storage, and data-adjacent uses, where are we seeing sub-asset-class growth or potential contraction relative to the market?
Xander Snyder (25:29): To start with industrial outdoor storage, IOS has gone from an extremely niche market pre-pandemic, largely dominated by mom-and-pop operators and small family offices, which typically required a lot of expertise in that one specific area. When the pandemic hit and demand for industrial space grew, you needed nearby land to store all the equipment and vehicles used to move goods in and out of warehouses. That’s where demand for IOS really took off, especially infill IOS, in urban centers as close as possible to the larger warehouses. You’ve got to put the trucks somewhere. As a result, we’ve seen a real surge in demand for IOS, and more institutional capital has begun buying up the smaller owners who’ve typically held these properties for a good long while.
That suggests there’s an opportunity for a roll-up strategy, something that was more prevalent in the self-storage market maybe five years ago: you buy 10, 15, or 20 individual self-storage properties to create a single portfolio, and then you sell it on to the next middle-market player. That sort of dynamic is beginning to happen in IOS.
Cold storage is an interesting market, and it’s been in fairly high demand. It’s more constrained than IOS in terms of where you can create new space, because you need a lot of electricity to keep things cold. And if food supply chains are disrupted at all by tariffs, where that space needs to be might shift slightly. Interestingly, I heard the other day that the rise in demand for GLP-1
Xander Snyder (27:50): drugs, what are they called? Is it Mounjaro and…
Gordon Lamphere (27:56): Yeah, yeah.
Xander Snyder (27:59): Those all need to be stored in cold facilities throughout the entire supply chain. It’s similar to the COVID vaccine, actually. There was a really strong surge in demand for cold storage because we needed to keep the vaccine below a certain temperature when we first started shipping it out several years ago. So I think it’s a very interesting niche sub-asset class within the broader industrial market. It’s location constrained in a way that IOS isn’t because of the utility requirements, and in that sense it’s a little more similar to data centers, although of course there are differences between the two as well.
Gordon Lamphere (28:39): What have you seen in terms of data center growth? We get calls at least every day, sometimes multiple times a day, from funds trying to find huge blocks of land with ample power and zoning for a data center. What are you seeing in terms of data center growth in the Midwest, and how is it shaping the market in general?
Xander Snyder (29:02): It’s fairly substantial. There’s an incredible amount of capital chasing data centers right now, in both construction and the purchase market. Interestingly, if you look at the valuations of public pure-play data center REITs, they’re quite high, so you might argue that in the public equity markets, a lot of the prospective growth in AI is already baked into valuations. But that’s a longer, drawn-out conversation.
There’s a lot of land that could potentially be used for data center development in the Midwest. I don’t live in the Midwest, but I recently traveled there. I was in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit. In Indianapolis, there are discussions of a big new data center going in, but there’s quite a lot of local opposition to it. Unlike 3PL logistics properties, which need a lot of industrial labor to function and create those jobs when they come to market, data centers don’t necessarily do that once they’re up and running. It takes a lot of construction labor to build them, but not as many people to run them. So there’s some political opposition in some of the places that could be big new data center locations.
Gordon Lamphere (30:33): I’ll tell you, on my side, we’ve seen huge pushback on data centers in Chicagoland. What’s interesting is that with trucks, as you mentioned, there are a lot of jobs and opportunities around trucking and logistics, and the pushback typically comes from the immediate neighbors. With data centers, it’s a whole municipality or county, because in many markets, depending on the municipal deal-making, data centers tend to drive up electrical costs drastically. So you have a whole plethora of people pushing back, whereas with trucking, unless you’re really two or three houses away, you don’t notice it.
Xander Snyder (31:23): Yes, exactly. If there’s all this new demand for electricity and it affects everyone in the neighborhood, you can clearly imagine that if the community isn’t directly sharing in the economic upside of the data center but is sharing in the costs, they’re not going to be thrilled about it. That’s part of the reason there’s been a lot more discussion of power plants dedicated to specific data centers. There are discussions about modular nuclear power plants, which are beginning to become popular but aren’t very widespread yet. So one of the main types of dedicated power plants right now is natural gas, and interestingly, that has resulted in a shortage of specific parts, like natural gas turbines. But unless you as the data center owner can insulate the community from those price increases, you have to imagine there’s going to be local opposition to more of them being built.
Constraints on New Supply
Gordon Lamphere (32:30): We’ve had a number of guests on the podcast on the data center topic, and we’re having more this week. I want to move to one final portion before our Final Four. For all these Midwest municipalities and regions that have seen industrial growth, what do you think are the biggest constraints on supply, besides just investment from developers?
Xander Snyder (33:04): That’s where my mind went first, as the major constraint. If you have a lot of existing competition and existing supply, it’s going to be harder to underwrite new projects. So that’s a major constraint. Let me think about some others. Honestly, I don’t have a great answer for you. I think the major constraints will be access to capital and, for specific sub-asset classes, access to utilities. That’s where I think you’ll run into a lot of the challenges: expensive construction financing, and equity capital that’s somewhat fearful of high vacancy rates that may persist for the next three years or so.
Gordon Lamphere (33:46): We’ve had guests from a couple of REITs on who talked about energy being a major factor, and I know you mentioned that. Are there certain markets with particularly strong energy infrastructure that could more easily handle demand and growth in high-energy asset classes like data centers, cold storage, and manufacturing, as we see manufacturing potentially ramp up? Which markets are best positioned, versus the Midwest in general?
Xander Snyder (34:24): It’s a great question. I don’t have the data at the top of my head. I’d like to go answer that question. It would be a function of megawatts or gigawatts produced in different cities, and transmission capabilities, but I don’t know it off the top of my head.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere (34:44): Let’s get to our Final Four. It’s always a nice wrap-up and a way to understand a little more about you and where commercial real estate markets are going. What do you think will have changed the most about industrial real estate, industrial supply, and the industrial commercial real estate market in general ten years from now?
Xander Snyder (35:07): I think ten years from now, we’ll see that our need for commercial real estate space more broadly, and industrial specifically, will have changed a lot compared to pre-pandemic. That shock really changed the balance of how much commercial space we need. We need a lot less office space than we used to. We need more housing than we used to. And I think we’re going to continue to need more industrial space as e-commerce becomes more prevalent and as AI continues to grow.
So over the next ten years, I expect a lot of the space we don’t need as much of, like some office properties, to be repurposed or razed and rebuilt. And I think a lot of the niche asset classes that haven’t really been top of mind for most commercial real estate investors over the last 30 years are going to become a lot more mainstream, because we’re going to need a lot more of them. Data centers and cold storage, within industrial, are the two that come to mind.
Gordon Lamphere (36:12): We’re working on three different office conversions right now, so that’s not super surprising. In terms of things that have surprised me personally, I’ve learned a lot as I’ve gotten older, and I definitely made some mistakes as a young man. If you could give yourself advice when you were, say, graduating high school, what would it be?
Xander Snyder (36:39): You live and you learn, and that’s where the experience comes from, right? It’s a bit cliché to say that real estate is a relationship business, but it really is. I talked recently on a podcast about how AI might affect some of the information asymmetry that characterizes our industry. But real estate is still really characterized by information asymmetry, which means you don’t always have the same amount of information as someone else in your network. So the more people you know who want to work with you, the better, because that’s how you get information about off-market deals and about sellers who are motivated for reasons that could lead to a good purchase price.
So if I were talking to myself 15 years ago, I’d say make sure part of your professional development is a steady diet of networking. Meet as many people in the industry as possible, but also network with people outside the immediate commercial real estate industry. Part of the reason I suggest the second part is that when you only talk to people in your own industry, you’re more prone to groupthink. You get information walls, and your information becomes more siloed. When you meet a lot of people in your industry, you increase your chances of opportunities coming your way, especially if people want to work with you. And by networking with people outside the industry, you can check and be skeptical of some of the things considered common knowledge in commercial real estate.
The second thing I’d say is to balance that diet of networking with a constant acquisition of technical skills, which I think is particularly important when you’re starting out. I know AI will change how things work, but you can’t be a junior analyst if you don’t know how to build financial models or understand how debt works within the broader capital structure of a deal. And I still think coding skills are a really important technical differentiator, though that may change in the future. So: a diet of networking and a constant acquisition of technical skills.
Gordon Lamphere (39:01): One of the ways we like to gain more skills and perspective, besides networking, is through books or media. If you could recommend some form of media our listeners should pick up or tune into next, what would it be?
Xander Snyder (39:24): I think one of the single most important books I’ve ever read is Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. I think it came out in 2014. It was essentially a summary of these two empirical psychologists’ life work studying economic behavior. For example, if you’ve heard that the rational actor theory of economics has largely been disproven at this point, that comes from these two researchers’ body of work, where they demonstrated that people value downside differently than upside.
The biggest takeaway from the book is that we’re all prone to cognitive fallacies. There’s no escaping it. It’s part of how our minds function as human beings. The best we can do is become aware of them, and when we are, we can put up guardrails that automatically correct one way or another and keep us from going too far down a fallacy hole. I think that’s really important in investing broadly, and in commercial real estate, because it means you’re always going to be a little more skeptical of your assumptions. You’ll be more aware of what assumptions you’re making, and they won’t just be subconscious.
If you look at some of the winners and losers of the last four years, and we’re just at the beginning of the next cycle, I think a lot of sponsors struggling right now made assumptions that just weren’t realistic in 2021 and 2022, and didn’t manage their debt cautiously enough, because they didn’t know what was going to happen to interest rates. So being aware of how the human mind can fail you, even when you’re really experienced, is one of the best things you can do. This book is worth a read.
Gordon Lamphere (41:27): One of the best ways we like to expand our minds is networking, the topic you brought up earlier in our Final Four. The whole point of this podcast is to reach out to some of the best people in and around the industry to learn more about where commercial real estate is going, and to expand our minds and our network. So who should be the next person we have on the podcast?
Xander Snyder (41:59): If you haven’t had the opportunity to talk with Josh Volen at CIRE Equity, C-I-R-E, I think you absolutely should. They’ve been going for about 15 years as an independent PE shop, and before that the founders worked at a brokerage and a big acquisition shop. These guys are great operators. They understand the market, and they understand how to create value in situations where others might not see opportunity. They’re repeatedly able to find situations with a motivated seller, execute on the project, and find affordable debt capital. They’re just really smart guys. So I definitely recommend talking to Josh Volen.
Another name I’d drop is a good friend of mine from school, Sam Bendix, at Chicago Pacific, and he works across all different types of asset classes. Josh at CIRE started off as a retail guy, but now they’re mainly retail and industrial. You’ll learn a lot about how to add value to less obvious opportunities if you talk to him.
Gordon Lamphere (43:19): If you can make a connection to Josh and Sam, I would love that. But if somebody wants to connect with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?
Xander Snyder (43:28): I’m fairly active on all the typical social media, so X and LinkedIn. You can find me as Xander Snyder, and @XanderSnyder is my X handle. Feel free to reach out by email at [email protected]. I’m happy to chat about commercial real estate trends and data, and those are probably the best ways to get hold of me.
Gordon Lamphere (43:53): Xander, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast, and we’d be happy to have you on in the future.
Xander Snyder (43:57): Thanks so much for your time, Gordon. Nice chatting with you.
Gordon Lamphere (44:00): Thanks again to Xander. 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 continue to bring on 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.