Merci Equity Partners, 6822 Birmingham Avenue, McCordsville, IN (2026)

09/16/2026

A few years ago, the narrative around retail real estate was simple: e-commerce wins, physical stores lose. That story hasn't just softened — in the neighborhood retail segment, it's been proven wrong.

National retail vacancy is sitting near its lowest level in about two decades, somewhere in the 4-5% range. Grocery-anchored centers and neighborhood strip centers are outperforming nearly every other property type in commercial real estate right now, and the reason isn't sentiment — it's math.

Here's what's driving it:

Almost nothing new is being built. Retail construction has fallen sharply over the past few years, which means existing centers face no new competition. In a growing number of markets, landlords are negotiating from real leverage for the first time in a long while.

Grocery is the anchor that keeps working. Centers built around a grocery tenant consistently post lower inline vacancy and stronger rent growth than unanchored strip centers, and that gap tends to widen rather than close during softer economic stretches. The grocery run still drives the nail salon visit, the dry cleaner drop-off, the quick lunch — every inline tenant benefits from that foot traffic.

Necessity-based tenants are filling the gaps. As some big-box names have exited, grocery, off-price, beauty, medical, and service tenants have moved in fast. Backfill timelines that used to stretch for a year or more are compressing, and in several major markets that space is being re-leased at meaningfully higher rents than before.

Quality is doing the separating. This isn't a rising tide lifting every property. Well-located, well-merchandised centers are thriving. Older, under-tenanted, or poorly located centers are still struggling to find their footing — and increasingly becoming candidates for repositioning rather than simple releasing.

The takeaway for investors: neighborhood retail isn't a defensive afterthought anymore. It's one of the more disciplined, supply-constrained opportunities in the market — provided you're buying the right asset in the right location.

Are you seeing grocery-anchored centers command the kind of pricing confidence in your markets that we're seeing nationally?

09/14/2026

The industrial boom of the past few years ran on a simple formula: build fast, lease fast, watch rents climb. That era is over, and what's replacing it is arguably healthier.

National industrial vacancy has settled in the 7-9% range, only a slight uptick from a year ago, which tells you the market isn't cooling so much as catching its breath. Rent growth has moderated too — still positive, but a fraction of the double-digit gains some metros saw in 2023.

New construction starts are at their lowest point in roughly a decade, which sounds like bad news until you realize it's exactly what a market needs to work through its oversupply.

Here's what that shift actually means for investors:

Underwriting has gotten stricter. Lenders and buyers are paying far more attention to tenant credit quality, lease duration, and asset location than they were two years ago. Pro forma rent growth assumptions that once looked conservative now look aggressive.

Older buildings are losing ground. A meaningful share of negative absorption is coming from pre-2020 facilities that can't meet today's clear-height, power, or automation requirements. That's a warning for anyone holding legacy product — and an opportunity for anyone willing to reposition it.

Location discipline is back. Port-proximate markets, rail-served corridors, and metros tied to semiconductor or manufacturing investment are outperforming. Speculative bets on secondary submarkets are a much harder sell to capital partners today.

Pricing power is shifting selectively. Landlords with modern, well-located, fully leased assets are regaining some leverage. Everyone else is negotiating.

None of this points to a downturn. It points to a market shedding its excesses and rewarding the investors who do the underwriting work rather than riding the wave. For patient capital, that's usually where the better deals live.

Are you seeing more disciplined underwriting show up in your own deal flow this year?

09/11/2026

For years, Ohio flew under the radar for investors chasing the usual Sun Belt growth story. That's changing fast.

Columbus and its surrounding submarkets — New Albany, Groveport, West Jefferson — are now home to one of the busiest industrial pipelines in the country, with millions of square feet of data center space alone currently under construction. Add in continued semiconductor investment nearby, and you have a region where infrastructure spending is running years ahead of most of its peers.

Here's what makes Ohio different:

Location. Roughly 60% of the U.S. and Canadian population sits within a day's drive of Columbus. For logistics, distribution, and e-commerce tenants, that's not a nice-to-have — it's the whole business case.

Population growth. Smaller cities like Marysville are expanding faster than the national average, pulling retail and mixed-use development along with them. Growth isn't confined to one metro; it's spreading across the state.

Cost. Land, construction, and operating costs still sit well below coastal and Sun Belt benchmarks, which matters even more now that construction costs nationally have climbed sharply since 2020.

Diversified demand. Industrial remains the anchor, but office tenants are consolidating into higher-quality suburban space, retail is holding steady on the back of population gains, and multifamily-commercial hybrid projects are becoming more common as developers blend living, working, and retail into single developments.

None of this looks like a boom-and-bust story. It looks like a market building durable fundamentals — the kind institutional capital tends to notice a little later than it should.

For investors still anchored to the same five or six "gateway" markets, Ohio is worth a second look. The numbers are starting to make the case on their own.

What's your take — is the Midwest finally getting its due from institutional capital, or does it still have ground to make up?

09/01/2026

September is here — and we are showing up for it. 🚀

Wishing every client, partner, and supporter a month full of wins worth celebrating and work worth doing.

Happy new month from the Merci Equity Partners, LLC family. 🏠

08/01/2026

As we welcome August, we're reminded that every new month brings fresh opportunities to build, invest, and grow.

Whether you're an investor, developer, industry professional, or business leader, here's to making informed decisions, creating lasting value, and embracing new possibilities.

Wishing you a productive, prosperous, and successful August.

Happy New Month from all of us at Merci Equity Partners, LLC.

07/31/2026

Halfway through 2026, the mood across commercial real estate has genuinely shifted. After two years of defensive positioning, investors are moving toward what one industry outlook called "measured confidence."

The numbers back that up — but where the capital is actually landing tells a more specific story than the headline optimism suggests.

CBRE forecasts commercial real estate investment activity will rise 16% in 2026 to $562 billion, nearly matching the pre-pandemic five-year average. Cap rates are expected to compress 5-15 basis points across most property types, with the best compression reserved for the highest-quality assets.

Bid-ask spreads are narrowing, banks are selectively re-entering the lending market, and private credit continues to step in where traditional lenders remain cautious.

This isn't 2021-style capital chasing everything with a cap rate. Liquidity is concentrating in sectors with genuinely strong fundamentals — industrial, multifamily, data centers, and life sciences — while office continues working through structural, not cyclical, distress.

Class A office cap rates sit around 8.4%, compared to roughly 5% for Class A industrial. That 300-plus basis point gap is the market pricing risk with real conviction.

Colliers calls it the "gold standard" of institutional allocation, and the data support the label: among the lowest delinquency rates of any property type, positive absorption, and moderating but still-healthy rent growth. Even as national industrial vacancy normalizes into the mid-single digits, institutional appetite hasn't cooled.

This is the part worth watching closely. Institutional capital that spent the last cycle chasing Sun Belt growth stories is now moving inland. Morgan Properties committed $500 million and Clear Investment Group $300 million to Midwest multifamily positions.

Chicago multifamily sales more than doubled in a recent quarter, with Class A pricing up 33% over the 2022-2024 average. Underwriting teams that once treated Columbus, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee as afterthoughts are now building them into base-case allocations.

The logic is straightforward: higher relative cap rates, healthier rent-to-income ratios, and none of the oversupply overhang weighing down Austin, Phoenix, or Nashville.

When institutional capital starts moving into a historically under-allocated region, it tends to compress cap rates over time — which means the window for buying ahead of that repricing is open now, not indefinitely.

Total returns in 2026 will be driven by income, not appreciation. That favors disciplined asset selection over broad market bets. For anyone underwriting deals in the second half of the year, the Midwest thesis isn't a contrarian call anymore — it's becoming consensus.

The opportunity is in moving before that consensus is fully priced in.

07/29/2026

The Empire State Building is still the best real-world case study out there. A technology-driven retrofit cut its energy consumption by 38%, generating roughly $4.4 million in annual savings.

That's not a small pilot project — it's one of the most recognizable buildings in the world, proving the economics work at scale. More broadly, buildings with full IoT integration are seeing energy consumption drop 15-25%, with some operators pairing HVAC optimization, lighting, and shading controls to exceed 40% savings.

Instead of fixing equipment on a calendar or waiting for it to fail, sensors now track vibration, temperature, and power draw to flag problems before they happen.

The result: early fault detection can cut maintenance expenses by 10-15% and unplanned outages by 20-30%, while extending the lifespan of equipment like chillers, boilers, and elevators by 20% or more. For an owner managing a large portfolio, that's fewer emergency service calls and more predictable capital planning.

This is the part that matters most for investors. According to NAR research, smart building technology typically raises property value by 3-5% and reduces time on market. Building performance has also become a board-level metric — 72% of Fortune 500 companies now include it in ESG reporting, up from 41% just three years ago. Lenders and institutional buyers are increasingly treating smart infrastructure as a due diligence item, not a nice-to-have.

Here's the catch: fewer than 20% of commercial buildings have implemented even basic IoT monitoring. That's a real opportunity for owners willing to move now, but it also means most of the market hasn't priced this in yet.

Retrofit costs for existing buildings typically run $0.50 to $1.50 per square foot, depending on how much legacy infrastructure needs to be bridged — a real number, but a small one compared to the operating savings and valuation lift over a hold period.

The building that predicts a failing chiller before it fails isn't just cheaper to run. It's becoming the building tenants and lenders actively prefer.

Is your portfolio treating smart building tech as an operating expense or as a value-add investment?

07/27/2026

Ask most people what drives Chicago's industrial market, and they'll say warehousing. That's only part of the picture now. Manufacturing is reshoring, data centers are consuming power at a pace the grid can barely keep up with, and the deals getting signed reflect a market that's diversified well beyond distribution boxes.

Chicago industrial vacancy sits around 5.3%, with Q1 2026 leasing activity reaching 16.3 million square feet — a 40.7% jump year-over-year. Big-box vacancy over 500,000 square feet actually declined 110 basis points year-over-year, showing real depth in large-tenant demand.

The named deals tell the story: Hyundai Translead leased 1.4 million square feet in Rockdale for trailer manufacturing and distribution. General Mills renewed 1.5 million square feet in Wilmington, anchoring the I-80 food logistics corridor. RJW Logistics took the full 788,000 square feet in Plainfield.

Trade policy uncertainty and supply chain resilience priorities are pushing manufacturers back toward Chicago's deep supplier networks and multimodal transportation access.

Industrial tenants are increasingly requiring specialized power and heavy floor loads that favor build-to-suit development over speculative space — a real shift from the leasing patterns of a few years ago.

This is where Chicago's story gets interesting. The data center market grew by more than 268 megawatts year-over-year, pushing vacancy down to 2.4% and driving rental rate growth of roughly 11%. Illinois' sales-tax exemption on qualified equipment and competitive industrial power rates have pulled in more than $11 billion in new build commitments since 2019.

Power planners expect data-center load on the regional grid to jump from roughly 400 megawatts today to nearly 5 gigawatts — equivalent to five nuclear reactors' worth of demand. Crane Worldwide's nearly 1.0 million square foot lease in McCook, tied to AWS equipment handling, shows how directly this demand is now touching industrial real estate deals.

Chicago's industrial story isn't one growth driver anymore — it's three running in parallel. Warehousing has matured into a more disciplined, build-to-suit market. Manufacturing is finding new life through reshoring.

And data centers are pulling in hyperscale capital that didn't exist in this asset class a decade ago. For investors, that diversification is exactly what makes Chicago's industrial base more resilient than markets riding a single demand driver.

Which of these three growth engines do you think has the most staying power over the next five years?

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07/18/2026

The math has gotten simple for a lot of renters: owning now costs roughly twice as much per month as renting in most U.S. markets, and only about 12.7% of renters can actually afford a median-priced home where they live. That gap isn't closing anytime soon — and it's reshaping where multifamily capital is heading.

While Sun Belt markets work through a supply hangover, the Midwest tells a different story. Six of the ten U.S. markets with the strongest multifamily rent growth between May 2025 and May 2026 were in the region — Chicago, Columbus, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Indianapolis among them.

National Apartment Association data backs this up: the Midwest is projected for 3-4.5% rent growth in 2026, supported by low construction levels and stable demand, while Sun Belt markets are still absorbing years of overbuilding.

This isn't just a supply story. Median home prices in Columbus, Indianapolis, and Kansas City remain well below the national average, and rent-to-income ratios across the region are healthier than in coastal metros or even Sun Belt cities that saw sharp rent appreciation over the past five years.

That matters operationally: residents who aren't rent-burdened tend to renew instead of chasing the next concession-heavy lease-up. Lower turnover, steadier occupancy, and less sensitivity when the broader economy softens.

Sun Belt metros like Austin have seen rents fall nearly 5% year-over-year as new supply outpaces absorption. The Midwest never chased that same aggressive development cycle, largely because the rent growth needed to make the numbers pencil wasn't there in the first place. The upside now: less oversupply to work through, and a renter base that's staying local and staying put rather than chasing the next hot market.

The setup favors workforce and attainable housing over luxury products. Renters across the country are showing what one industry analysis called "luxury fatigue" — prioritizing value and design that fit their budget over amenity arms races. In Midwest markets, that preference lines up naturally with what's already being built.

For multifamily investors who spent the last cycle chasing Sun Belt growth stories, the Midwest's steadier, affordability-driven demand might be the less flashy — and more durable — bet going into 2026.

07/16/2026

Here's the number that tells the whole story: Class A and trophy office rents rose 68 basis points year-over-year, while overall market rents fell 35 basis points over the same period. Same market, same economy, completely different trajectory — depending entirely on the building.

National office vacancy sits around 17.6%, but that headline number hides two very different markets. Prime and trophy assets in cities like Washington, D.C. have seen vacancy drop to 9.3%, while Class B space in the same market sits at 28.7% — roughly double what it was a decade ago. Tenants aren't leaving buildings because rent is too high. They're leaving because the buildings themselves can't deliver what modern occupiers expect.

It's not just a fresh lobby and a nicer gym. Tenants are evaluating:

Technology infrastructure — buildings wired for AI-driven systems, high-speed connectivity, and smart building management, not retrofitted after the fact

Sustainability performance — energy efficiency isn't a marketing line anymore; it's tied directly to operating costs and increasingly to lender requirements

Flexible, amenity-rich layouts — space that can adapt to hybrid work patterns without a full renovation

Wellness features — natural light, air quality, and design that firms use as a recruiting tool

Organizations are backing this up with dollars. Across sectors, 42-54% of decision-makers say they'll pay a premium specifically for technology-enabled space.

What's happening to everything else?

The buildings that can't compete aren't just losing tenants slowly — they're being pulled from the market entirely. Nearly 40 million square feet of office space was removed from inventory in 2025 alone for conversion or redevelopment, and some forecasts put total office removals north of 250 million square feet in the coming years. That's not a correction. That's a structural reset of what counts as viable office inventory.

If you own an asset that isn't Class A or better, the strategy can't be "wait it out." Landlords who are winning right now are the ones investing in spec suites, tech upgrades, and sustainability retrofits before a tenant asks — not after they've already toured a newer building down the street.

Quality used to be a differentiator. Now it's the baseline for staying relevant at all.

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Merci Equity Partners

09/16/2026

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