Real Finds Podcast: Commercial Real Estate Unfiltered

Sean Hostert is a principal, investor, advisor, and founder of Net Lease Observer, widely regarded as the net lease industry's leading independent analyst. A finance major out of the University of Illinois who started his career advising mortgage servicers at PwC after the 2008 crisis, Sean found his way into net lease in 2013 at Cole Capital, a non-traded REIT platform in Phoenix. From the FP&A side of the business, he develop...

Fiber connectivity has quietly become one of the most decisive factors in data center site selection, and the AI buildout is about to make it far more complex. In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Bruce Garrison, CEO of BIG Fiber, one of the leading names in metro dark fiber infrastructure serving the San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Portland, and Greater Atlanta.Bruce brings more than 20 years i...

Everyone said 25 Water Street was unconvertible. Too big. Too deep. Too much building. Eugene Flotteron converted it anyway, and it became the largest completed office-to-residential conversion in American history: 1.1 million square feet of vacant Manhattan office space transformed into 1,320 apartments, with two courtyards carved out of the building's core and a 10-story addition stacked on top.On this episode of The Real Finds P...

Industrial real estate looks remarkably similar whether you are in Edmonton, Dallas, or Chicago. On this episode of the Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Chad Griffiths, MBA, SIOR, CCIM, a partner at NAI Commercial in Edmonton and host of The Industrial Real Estate Show, the most-watched industrial real estate podcast in the industry. Chad shares two decades of perspective on the Alberta market, the universal force...

Episode 101 of The Real Finds Podcast features Daniel North, a partner in the Chicago office of Polsinelli, whose practice has built an accidental niche in industrial real estate that took off during COVID and has not slowed since. With over a billion dollars in national property deals behind him, Daniel walks through the legal mechanics of how today's industrial, data center, and multifamily transactions actually get done in a mar...

Welcome to episode 100 of the Real Finds Podcast. To mark the milestone, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Whitaker Irvin Jr., CEO of Q Hydrogen, the company commercializing a breakthrough hydrogen production technology and preparing to open one of the world's first economically viable renewable hydrogen power plants in Groveton, New Hampshire.

The most common refrain across 100 episodes has been simple: we don't talk about energy and ...

On this episode of the Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Kurt and Stewart Jensen, SIORs and industrial brokers at Kessinger Hunter & Company in Kansas City. Two thirds of the legendary Jensen team, Kurt and Stewart bring a practitioner's view of the Midwest industrial market and the case for regional expertise in a globalized brokerage world.

We dig into what's actually happening on the ground in Kansas City ind...

Brownfields, abandoned industrial and commercial properties sitting idle across America's cities and suburbs represent some of the most undervalued opportunities in commercial real estate. But unlocking that value requires navigating a maze of environmental due diligence, contamination risk, and government incentive programs that most investors don't fully understand.

On this episode of the Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits d...

What separates top dealmakers from everyone else? The answer isn't market knowledge or leverage...it's persuasion.

Josh Bandoch, persuasion expert, TEDx speaker, policy advocate, and author of How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion, joins Gordon Lamphere to break down the neuroscience behind every negotiation, landlord-tenant dispute, and community approval process in commercial real estate.

Josh spent ...

Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Q1 2026: The Market Stopped Waiting Eighteen months ago, this market was in a holding pattern. That phase is over. Not because the uncertainty resolved — it didn't. But the deals that are getting done right now are being priced for a world that is permanently more expensive to build in, permanently more selective about where institutional capital goes, and permanently more bifurcated between...

Aaron Shavel is a professional engineer who built his career in heavy civil construction, including years on MTA subway projects in New York, and now advises on battery energy storage facilities being deployed across the Northeast. He writes on construction, infrastructure policy, and urbanism on Substack and has become one of the sharper voices connecting how things actually get built to how communities actually function.

In this e...

Frank Forte started his career mopping up bank failures at the U.S. Treasury, worked the largest commercial real estate default in U.S. history at Fortress/CW Capital (the $5.4B Peter Cooper Village-Stuyvesant Town deal), and placed $2B/year in debt and equity at Berkadia before going out on his own at 27. A decade later, Lucerne Capital has done $400M in volume, raised $100M in equity, and generated north of 30% IRR on many of its...

What if your building could think?

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Honghao Deng, co-founder and CEO of Butlr, to break down how AI, sensors, and real-time data are transforming the way we design, operate, and invest in physical space.

From MIT’s City Science Lab to deploying millions of sensors globally, Honghao explains why buildings are the largest interface humans interact with daily...

How much of the data center boom is really about real estate — and how much of it is about power?

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Britt Burt of Industrial Info Resources to unpack one of the most important forces shaping commercial real estate, industrial development, and infrastructure investment today: the growing electricity demand.

Britt brings nearly four decades of experience cove...

The future of work isn’t coming...it’s already here, and it’s moving faster than most businesses are prepared for.

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with futurist Elatia Abate to break down how artificial intelligence is reshaping the workforce, eliminating traditional career ladders, and forcing companies to rethink everything from hiring to strategy. From disappearing entry-leve...

Insurance is one of the largest and least understood costs in commercial real estate. In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Lisa Holt, founder of Ivy Risk, to unpack how insurance markets actually work and why developers, investors, and property owners are seeing dramatic shifts in costs.

Lisa explains how insurance brokers evaluate real estate risk, why development projects are uniquely difficult...

Caregiving is no longer a “personal issue” happening outside the workplace. It’s a workforce issue, a design issue, and a real estate issue.

Our blog: https://www.vvco.com/caregiving-building-for-a-longevity-society-and-the-future-of-work-with-marisa-toldo-rfp-89/

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Marisa Toldo—an architect and researcher focused on the built environment...

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Mike Herl, SIOR (Partner/Broker at Madison Commercial Real Estate)—who spent 17 years on the road and logged 3,500+ shows touring with major acts like Mötley Crüe, REO Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, and even crossing paths with Smashing Pumpkins (plus the broader Midwest orbit of legends like Steve Albini). Then he took that same high-stakes, contract-heavy, ...

This episode marks a rare, in-depth market briefing directly from Gordon Lamphere, drawing on real transactions, real underwriting, and real negotiations happening across Chicagoland as we enter Q1 2026.

Learn More: https://www.vvco.com/state-of-the-commercial-real-estate-market-2026-q1-rfp-87/

After a year of conversations with developers, corporate occupiers, lenders, municipal leaders, and operators across every major asset class...