Real Finds Podcast: Commercial Real Estate Unfiltered

Dr. Carey Chronis has spent more than 25 years running a pediatric practice in Ventura, California, and somewhere in the middle of it he discovered that the skill of connecting with a four-year-old, a defiant teenager, and a frustrated employee is fundamentally the same skill. His forthcoming book, Connection Rethink: Team Culture from Home to Boardroom, argues that the leaders who win at work and...

On today's episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Ron Rohde, a commercial real estate attorney, active investor, and one of the most recognizable voices in the industrial outdoor storage (IOS) space. Based in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Ron runs the Law Office of Ronald Rohde, PLLC, where he advises clients across industrial, retail, office, and multifamily tran...

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...

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 Atlant...

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...

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...

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 tran...

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 sim...

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 happen...

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 F...

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 i...

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 perman...

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 comm...

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 genera...

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 inter...

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...

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 disap...

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 develop...

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...

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...

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 oper...

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast , host Gordon Lamphere sits down with Anita Verma-Lallian, a seasoned real estate developer at the intersection of data centers, energy infrastructure, AI, and film studio development. With a family background spanning more than four decades of land development, Anita shares how her platform has evolved from residential and industrial projects into some of...

On this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, Gordon Lamphere sits down with Justin Den Herder, structural engineer, professor at The Cooper Union, and principal at global engineering firm TY Lin, to unpack what mass timber really means for commercial real estate. They dig into how mass timber moves from romantic concept to bankable project, why embodied carbon is finally showing up in real underwrit...

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, host Gordon Lamphere sits down with Cali Williams Yost, CEO and founder of the Flex+Strategy Group, to explore how CEOs, COOs, HR leaders, and real estate decision makers can move beyond simple “return to office” mandates and design truly high performance flexible work models. Cali has been a pioneer in flexible work since the late 1990s, and she explains...

In this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, host Gordon Lamphere sits down with industrial outdoor storage specialist Andrew Wiesemann to unpack one of the hottest, most misunderstood asset classes in commercial real estate today. From zoning headaches and generational turnover to cap rate spreads and sovereign wealth funds, this conversation is a masterclass in how IOS really works on the ground....