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

06/22/2026

This isn't a market that relies on hype. It runs on automotive supply chains, advanced manufacturing, regional distribution, and the kind of unglamorous but essential logistics infrastructure that keeps the Midwest economy moving. In 2026, that foundation is being built on in interesting ways.

West Michigan: Structurally tight, quietly strategic.

Grand Rapids doesn't make national industrial headlines. It doesn't need to. Warehouse vacancy across West Michigan remains below 3%, with the northwest submarket posting the strongest gains — driven by warehouse leasing and steady user demand. Those numbers reflect a market where supply has simply not kept pace with the depth of occupier demand.

The deal flow is backing that up. Bay Logistics — affiliated with Martin Transportation Systems — acquired a former Utz Brands manufacturing and warehouse facility in Grand Rapids for $20 million at the end of 2025, the highest industrial transaction in the city for the year. The company plans to convert the food-grade facility into a centralized distribution center to support its expanding West Michigan customer base.

That kind of transaction — a regional logistics operator acquiring and repurposing an existing asset to consolidate operations — is exactly what a maturing, supply-constrained industrial market looks like. There's no chasing of new spec space. There's disciplined acquisition of what's available and making it work.

Metro Detroit: A market recalibrating — and doing it thoughtfully.

Southeast Michigan's industrial market had a bumpier 2025, absorbing the aftermath of a post-COVID overbuilding cycle. But the fundamentals are stabilizing. Metro Detroit's industrial vacancy rate declined 20 basis points to 4.4% in Q1 2026, as the market absorbed over 2.1 million square feet. That's a market moving in the right direction.

Build-to-suit momentum is building — with Piston Automotive completing a 715,012 SF facility in Auburn Hills, and four additional BTS projects underway for tenants including Mopar and LuxWall. Speculative development is returning to Romulus, with 1.1 million SF starting construction over the past four months.

Critically, Metro Detroit's vacancy, even at 5.2% by one measure, remains well below the national industrial average of approximately 7.6% — a gap that matters when assessing relative market health against the broader U.S. picture.

The automotive transition story also continues to shape this market in specific ways. Demand is surging in Southeastern Oakland County, bolstered by GM's retooling of the Orion Assembly plant — and that submarket led Metro Detroit with over 1.1 million SF of positive absorption in Q1 2026 alone. Where OEMs go, suppliers follow, and where suppliers follow, industrial real estate moves.

The corridor thesis, plainly stated.

What makes the Grand Rapids–Detroit corridor compelling isn't any single market in isolation. It's the complementary nature of the two. West Michigan offers tight fundamentals, lower land costs relative to coastal peers, and a manufacturing base that is deeply entrenched and growing. Metro Detroit offers scale, the deepest automotive and logistics tenant pool in the country, and a development pipeline that is finally returning — this time with discipline rather than speculation.

The return of speculative development in Metro Detroit in 2026 reflects a market that has matured and learned from the overbuilding cycle — not one that has overheated again. That's a meaningful distinction for investors underwriting long-term holds.

For capital looking at Midwest industrial with a multi-year horizon, this corridor deserves a closer look than it typically gets.

06/20/2026

Let's set aside the national noise for a moment and look at what's actually happening market by market, because the Midwest tells a nuanced story that gets lost in the headline vacancy numbers.

By 2025, hybrid work had settled in as the dominant model, with most organizations standardizing on two or three in-office days per week. The result wasn't just lower occupancy — it changed what companies needed. Demand shifted toward collaborative, flexible layouts with more meeting rooms and social areas, and fewer dedicated desks. Some firms reduced their overall footprint even while hiring, trading older, larger spaces for smaller, higher-quality offices in better buildings.

That flight-to-quality dynamic is exactly what Midwest office markets are now being forced to reckon with — and the winners and losers are coming into sharp focus.

Chicago: Expensive problem, but still the region's anchor.

Chicago's CBD vacancy rose to 24.7% by mid-2025, with average gross asking rents declining to $41.54 per square foot. Those numbers aren't comfortable. But context matters — Chicago recorded the largest increase in office space dedicated to coworking of any U.S. city over the past year, signaling that flexible workspace demand is actively absorbing what traditional leasing is not. By May 2026, Chicago had seen $714 million worth of office space change hands — the highest office sales total in the Midwest year-to-date. Capital is still moving, just more selectively.

Indianapolis: Honest about the challenge, adaptive in response.

Indianapolis ended 2025 with an overall office vacancy rate of 21.2%, reflecting the persistent impact of hybrid work and elevated sublease availability. But the market finished 2025 with positive net absorption of 58,000 SF — and over the past year, more than 500,000 SF of office space has been converted or redeveloped, actively removing obsolete inventory from the equation. That's a market working the problem rather than waiting it out.

The conversion story: Chicago and Cleveland lean in.

Chicago has 4,360 office-to-apartment conversions in the pipeline as of early 2026 — ranking third in the country. Cleveland ranks ninth nationally, with 1,771 conversions planned. These numbers reflect a broader reality: over $213 billion in office building loans are coming due by the end of 2026, and with remote work trends having eroded asset values, conversion is increasingly the most viable exit for distressed product.

What's actually working in 2026.

The companies that are winning the return-to-office challenge have moved from optional in-office days to structured anchor days built around collaboration and innovation — with spaces redesigned for flexible zones that can switch between collaborative and focused work.

Vacancy rates across the U.S. are expected to drop below 18% as more tenants return to the market, leverage expiring leases, and prioritize hospitality-driven workplaces that support hybrid work. The Midwest markets closest to that inflection point are the ones where Class A assets are leasing, adaptive reuse is clearing the obsolete stock, and employers are giving their teams a genuine reason to show up.

The office market isn't recovering uniformly. It's bifurcating — and the gap between what's competitive and what's obsolete is widening every quarter. For investors and occupiers alike, the Midwest in 2026 is a market that rewards precision over broad-brush conviction.

06/18/2026

For years, green bonds and tax credits were treated as add-ons. Something you considered after the deal was structured. That thinking has shifted — and the mechanism driving much of that shift is C-PACE: Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy financing.

In 2025, C-PACE definitively moved from niche to mainstream. Originations reached a record $3.5 billion, with deal sizes frequently exceeding $100 million as awareness expanded among owners, lenders, and institutional investors alike.

The deal flow in 2026 has only accelerated that story. Nuveen Green Capital closed a record $465 million C-PACE loan for The Geneva — a landmark office-to-residential conversion in Washington D.C. Average deal sizes have jumped from roughly $800,000 in 2017 to $40 million in 2026. That trajectory tells you everything about where institutional appetite has moved.

What's driving the adoption isn't just sustainability conviction — it's capital stack math.

In 2026, construction costs remain high, senior lenders are conservative on loan-to-cost ratios, and equity capital has become more expensive. These dynamics are forcing developers and capital advisors to rethink how projects get financed — and C-PACE has emerged as a mainstream solution that improves capital stack efficiency and reduces the weighted average cost of capital.

The maturity wall in commercial real estate — with $900 billion in loans maturing in 2026 alone — is creating unprecedented demand for alternative financing structures like C-PACE. When traditional lenders pull back, the tools that can fill the gap without diluting equity become very attractive, very quickly.

On the tax credit side, the picture has also clarified. Despite expectations that the current administration would eliminate green energy tax credits, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act preserved key transferability provisions and extended multiple credits through 2027-2029 — creating favorable market conditions for buyers and maintaining robust opportunities for developers. The uncertainty that stalled some projects in early 2025 has largely resolved.

C-PACE policies now exist across 40 states with 32 active programs — up from just six active programs in 2015. The infrastructure for this financing category has been quietly built out over a decade, and the market is now large enough to support institutional deal flow at scale.

There's a real estate argument here that goes beyond ESG conviction: energy-efficient buildings carry lower operating costs, attract stronger tenants, and face less regulatory risk as emissions disclosure requirements tighten. The Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark will begin scoring embodied carbon in its 2026 standard — adding another layer of accountability for institutional portfolios.

The firms getting ahead of this aren't just doing it to check a box. They're doing it because the capital structure works, the tax environment is more stable than expected, and the tenant demand for efficient, modern space continues to grow.

Green finance in CRE has stopped being a values conversation. It's now a returns conversation.

06/16/2026

Most Midwest retail markets are still finding their footing post-pandemic. Columbus skipped that chapter entirely.

Columbus ranked 10th among the top U.S. retail markets in 2025 according to CoStar — outperforming most Midwest peers and sitting alongside high-growth Sun Belt markets in occupancy rates, rent growth, and investment volume. For a city that rarely gets the national spotlight, that's a meaningful benchmark.

Retail vacancy in Columbus closed 2025 at just 3.0%, with 423,000 SF of net absorption despite elevated retailer bankruptcies and big-box move-outs hitting the market. When a market absorbs that kind of headwind without losing its footing, the underlying demand drivers are real.

But here's the nuance worth paying attention to — the story plays out differently depending on which part of Columbus you're watching.

Urban corridors: tight, experience-driven, and largely full.

Neighborhood corridors like Short North and German Village are posting sub-4% vacancy, sustained by foot traffic, walkability, and the kind of curated retail experience that draws both residents and visitors. These aren't just shopping destinations — they're community anchors, and the scarcity of available space reflects that. For investors, that tightness means limited entry points but strong rent stability for assets that do come to market.

Suburban nodes: where the development pipeline is actually going.

Development activity in Columbus is heavily concentrated in high-growth suburban submarkets, with 62% of active projects located in Powell, Hilliard, and New Albany. The format of choice? Neighborhood-serving retail — grocery-anchored centers, service-oriented storefronts, quick-service restaurants. The kind of tenants that aren't going anywhere.

North Columbus and Delaware County posted vacancy rates of nearly 2.5% in 2025, the lowest among major submarkets in the entire metro. And Delaware County — the state's fastest-growing county, projected to increase in population by roughly 50% by 2050 — is the kind of long-runway demographic story that retail investors build theses around.

What this means for capital.

Columbus retail investment closed Q4 2025 at $132 million in transactions, with private buyers representing 64% of deals and cap rates for single-tenant net-leased assets running in the mid-6% range. The profile of buyer is telling — this is patient, fundamentals-driven capital, not speculative money chasing yield.

The highest value deals are concentrating in suburban shopping centers along the I-270 corridor, while transaction volume is densest near the urban core. Both ends of the market are active. They're just being driven by different buyers with different mandates.

Columbus doesn't force you to choose between urban vibrancy and suburban growth. It offers both — in the same metro, at the same time. That kind of optionality is genuinely rare in the current retail environment.

06/12/2026

This is a city that has quietly been rebuilding its industrial identity — not around speculation, but around real infrastructure, deep manufacturing roots, and a port that most people outside the Midwest have never properly assessed.

Start with geography. The Port of Toledo operates 13 terminals along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway System, sitting at the intersection of I-75 and I-80/90 — two of the most critical freight corridors in the country. For industrial occupiers and logistics operators thinking about supply chain resiliency, that kind of multimodal access isn't a bonus. It's the whole thesis.

And the investment is following the infrastructure.

The Ohio Department of Transportation funded a new 60,000 SF warehouse at the Port's General Cargo Dock as part of a broader terminal modernization program — replacing aging facilities with modern cargo handling infrastructure, including a new liquid bulk transloading operation.

A $35 million Glass City Logistics Center, a 200,000 SF warehousing and transloading facility, broke ground in the first half of 2025 — designed specifically for high-value general cargo and pharmaceutical cold chain distribution. That's not a commodity play. That's a deliberate pivot toward higher-margin, more resilient cargo categories.

The manufacturing side tells a similar story. Cleveland-Cliffs now receives over two million tons of product annually via vessel at the Port of Toledo for hot-briquetted iron production, adding 100 new vessel calls per year to the port's traffic.

Meanwhile, IBC Properties recently completed a $10 million rehabilitation of the former Spicer-Dana manufacturing facility — a 400,000+ SF building brought back to life for industrial, light assembly, manufacturing, and warehousing uses, as part of a broader effort that has redeveloped over 4.8 million square feet across the Toledo region over 35 years.

The private market is responding too — a 208,000 SF industrial property within the Innovation Industrial Park in nearby Rossford just traded at $28 million. Deals don't happen in markets without conviction.

Toledo isn't a flashy market. It's a workhorse market — anchored by automotive supply chains, steel manufacturing, Great Lakes shipping, and now a deliberate push into next-generation logistics infrastructure. For investors who understand that durability matters more than buzz, this market checks a lot of boxes.

The fundamentals have been building for a while. The capital is starting to notice.

06/10/2026

The numbers make it clear. Venture capital firms invested $16.7 billion in PropTech in 2025 — a nearly 68% year-over-year increase from 2024. And momentum is accelerating: firms poured roughly $1.7 billion into the sector in January 2026 alone, a 176% jump from the same month a year prior.

That's not speculative capital chasing a trend. That's institutional money building infrastructure.

What's driving it? Three things, converging at once.

AI is moving from assistant to decision-maker.

Real estate leaders are beginning to embrace AI not just for content creation or lead management, but as a core business intelligence tool — one that identifies revenue opportunities at scale and puts high-level data within reach of ownership groups and C-suite operators who previously couldn't access it fast enough to act. The firms that still treat AI as a nice-to-have are falling behind the ones treating it as infrastructure.

IoT is turning buildings into data sources.

Smart buildings equipped with AI-driven IoT sensors are reducing operational costs, detecting issues before they become expensive problems, and meaningfully improving tenant satisfaction. For commercial landlords competing on net operating income, that's not a feature — it's a margin strategy.

Analytics is replacing gut feel.

The biggest shift in PropTech right now is the move from pilots to core infrastructure — AI-assisted valuations, rent forecasting, demand modeling, and predictive maintenance are no longer experimental. They're becoming standard operating procedure in institutional portfolios.

The underlying market tells the same story. The U.S. PropTech market is currently valued at $24.73 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $76.84 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 18.5%.

Here's the honest reality though — technology doesn't replace real estate fundamentals. Location, cash flow, and creditworthy tenants still win deals. What PropTech does is sharpen ex*****on: faster underwriting, smarter asset management, and leaner operations.

The firms getting this right aren't the ones chasing every new tool. They're the ones identifying where data actually improves a decision — and building around that.

That's where the edge lives in 2026.

06/08/2026

Most people still think of Huntsville as a quiet aerospace town. What's actually happening on the ground tells a very different story.

The industrial market here has quietly become one of the most strategically sound plays in the Southeast — and the institutions moving in are making that case loudly.

Eli Lilly selected Huntsville over 300 competing sites for a $6 billion manufacturing facility. That's not a local headline. That's a signal.

Amazon renewed a 1.3 million SF lease, and Norfolk Southern committed $200 million to a rail expansion in the market. When two of the most logistics-savvy companies in the world double down on the same city, you pay attention.

The demand drivers here aren't cyclical — they're structural. Huntsville's industrial base is anchored by defense, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing users, the kind of tenants that sign long leases, invest in their spaces, and don't disappear when the economy gets choppy.

Yes, the market has come off its post-pandemic sprint. Rent growth has moderated to 3.5% from over 11% in 2022 — but Huntsville's $9.40/SF average still ranks among the highest in the entire Southeast. That's not weakness. That's a healthy reset in a fundamentally strong market.

Developers have also pulled back on new deliveries, with only 450,000 SF currently under construction — which means supply tightening is already in motion. For investors and owner-occupiers alike, this is the window.

Unemployment sits at 2.3%. The workforce is skilled, the infrastructure investment is real, and the tenant base is creditworthy. That combination is rare anywhere in the country right now.

Huntsville doesn't need hype. The fundamentals speak clearly enough.

06/01/2026

June is here.

New month. Fresh energy. Another set of opportunities to build something worth building.

Whatever you're working toward this month — a new deal, a new project, a new habit — we hope it comes together better than you planned.

Here's to a productive June from all of us at Merci Equity Partners, LLC. 🙌

05/30/2026

Detroit has spent decades being the cautionary tale. The bankruptcy, the population loss, the abandoned buildings, the narrative of a city that the market left behind. That story is familiar to anyone who has followed commercial real estate for more than a few years.

What's less familiar — and what the data is starting to make harder to dismiss — is the story of what's happened since.

Detroit's multifamily market is demonstrating a rent resilience that would have been difficult to argue five years ago and is increasingly difficult to argue against today. Understanding why requires setting aside the legacy narrative long enough to look at what's actually happening on the ground.

Population loss was Detroit's defining story for half a century. It's no longer the only story.

The city proper and the broader metro have been experiencing something more nuanced than simple recovery. Selective, neighborhood-level repopulation has been underway for several years — concentrated in Midtown, Corktown, New Center, and the riverfront — driven by a demographic that is younger, more educated, and more intentionally choosing Detroit than the migration patterns of previous generations.

The reasons aren't sentimental. Detroit offers something that has become genuinely scarce in American urban real estate — affordability relative to quality of life. For young professionals priced out of Chicago, Nashville, or Austin, Detroit presents a compelling alternative. Walkable neighborhoods, renovated housing stock, a cultural scene that has developed organically rather than being manufactured, and a cost of living that allows people to actually build savings while living in a real city.

That demand profile — young, employed, urban-oriented — is exactly the tenant base that stabilizes multifamily rent rolls. They stay. They pay. And they're increasingly arriving in numbers that matter to the market.

The conventional Detroit story centers on automotive manufacturing. That industry remains important — Ford, GM, and Stellantis still anchor significant employment in the metro — but the employer base driving multifamily demand today is meaningfully broader.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have all established meaningful presences in the Detroit metro. Dan Gilbert's Bedrock real estate and Rocket Companies have collectively become one of the largest private employers in downtown Detroit and have been instrumental in anchoring the revitalization of the central business district.

Wayne State University and the broader university presence in Midtown creates a consistent pipeline of graduate students, faculty, and affiliated professionals who represent a durable renter cohort. That institutional anchor is often underappreciated in market analyses that focus on corporate employment alone.

05/27/2026

Eid Mubarak to all our Muslim brothers, sisters, partners, and community.

May this season of sacrifice, faith, and gratitude bring peace, joy, and abundant blessings to you and your loved ones. As we celebrate Eid el-Kabir, may your homes be filled with happiness and your hearts with renewed hope.

From all of us at Merci Equity Partners, LLC, we wish you a beautiful and peaceful celebration.

Merci Equity Partners

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