VP of Sales & Leasing, @VanVlissingenCo | Chicagoland's #1 ranked CRE broker 2026 | 100+ deals/yr | Host, @RealFindsPod | Love Your Enemies 🙏🏻 🇺🇸 Made
Chicagoland
Joined October 2019
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Greatful to work with @VanVlissingenCo, an experienced team with a vast network of occupier and investment contacts.
We leased a high-credit tenant, renewed, and maximized profit for the owners with a direct sale.
So thankful for the opportunity to serve our clients!
A landlord who offers more free rent instead of TI isn't being flexible.
He's telling you he can't fund construction.
Most real estate valuations in America were underwritten on the same pyramid as Social Security.
The rapid fertility decline broke that bet, and absent mass immigration, nothing backfills it. A 2026 pro forma assuming demand growth is betting on babies that will never come...
The comfortable lie is foreign wars and greedy politicians crippled social security but the hard truth is that our society’s choice to have fewer children is what crippled the system.
The US fertility decline mortgaged our future and the debt is coming due.
To the people arguing if it wasn’t for the foreign wars or fraud we’d be able to pay for social security, you’re just plain wrong.
Social security was a pyramid scheme supported by robust younger generations. Simply, we didn’t have enough kids and now the scheme is collapsing.
A sad truth of providing value in brokerage: spent 5-6 hours analyzing a potential sale, showed the owner his positioning wasn't viable, provided a better option, then offered a free referral if they wanted their unrealistic approach.
The response: Refer me pls.
Accepting the asking price feels efficient and reads as suspicious. Without a counter, the other side doesn't think "fair deal." They think "what did I miss?"
A negotiation isn't just price discovery. It's the ritual that lets both sides believe the number.
When I was a broker, I cold-called a retail property owner to tell them I had a buyer interested in purchasing.
They said they were open to selling, and named their price.
I quickly submitted an offer at their asking price, and they suddenly became nervous.
They set up a call with us where they asked for information about our company and how long it had been in business. We pointed out it was a national brokerage firm with offices all over America.
They were still very untrusting, and asked to come into our office to physically see it.
The only time they could come in was a weekend, so we set it up for a Saturday afternoon.
We showed them around the office, and answered more questions. They were nervous the entire time.
After our meeting they informed us they could not proceed.
They said it was very suspicious that there was nobody in the office at all, and they were feeling uneasy, and thoughts something fishy was going on.
Some people's biggest obstacle is literally just themselves.
I used to wonder how cold call prospects could be so angry at a stranger. Then today, in a hospital waiting room, I listened to a woman pour a sick parent's worth of fear into a cold caller.
Hurt people hurt people. You never know whose hurt you're calling into.
Why does storage demand outperform the material need?
Because people are human.
We cling to old things because they become vessels for old versions of ourselves we aren’t quite ready to lose.
Negotiating against the firm of Claude, Grok & Chat.
The law is rarely the issue.
The problem is the hours spent fighting confidently worded objections to
items that were never in dispute.
A tenant’s minor maintenance request is never about the faucet. It’s a test of whether anyone’s listening.
The trades keep retiring, construction costs keep compounding, and every “we’ll build when it pencils” plan quietly becomes “we’ll never build.”
Pulled up to a lockbox showing today.
Listing says fully sprinklered, dock, drive-in door.
Reality? … Dock. That's it.
Called the broker and he's never been to the space. Had to hop off the call to pitch another listing in a town he's never visited.
Nobody wants the truth about mentorship: it’s not given, it’s taken. The junior who waits to be developed retires undeveloped.
The one who makes themself useful to the best producer in the office gets an education nobody planned to provide.
You can’t manage commercial property from your desk.
Software reports what tenants submitted. Walking an asset reports what they didn’t.
Good third-party commercial property management has very small margins. So when a contract is boilerplate instead of built for the property, the math is broken somewhere.
Either the manager underbid and will underserve, or the landlord's overpaying.
The self-storage guys figured out what the office guys still haven’t.
Americans will pay for space they never visit.
