Chad Griffiths on Industrial Real Estate’s Next Decade
Industrial real estate may be the most universal asset class in commercial property. A 100,000 square foot box with dock doors, decent clear height, and highway access performs essentially the same job whether it sits in Edmonton, Dallas, or Chicago. On episode 102 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. Over two decades in the business, Griffiths has watched the sector evolve from an afterthought into the institutional darling of commercial real estate, and his read on what comes next deserves attention from every occupier and investor in the Midwest.
One Asset Class, Every Market
Griffiths operates in a metro with roughly 160 million square feet of industrial inventory, a market shaped by Alberta’s oil and gas economy in much the same way Houston’s industrial base tracks energy cycles. Yet the core lesson of his career is how little geography changes the fundamentals. Tenants everywhere weigh the same variables: clear height, power, truck courts, labor access, and proximity to customers. That universality is why the trends he tracks in Western Canada map so cleanly onto Chicagoland, where more than 1.4 billion square feet of warehouse, distribution, and manufacturing space make the region the largest industrial market in North America. Our recent breakdown of the state of the Chicago industrial market shows the same normalization Griffiths describes: availability tightening in infill nodes, rent growth cooling from its pandemic peak, and a widening gap between commodity boxes and infrastructure-rich facilities.
We're Here To Help
The Power Crisis Is Not Just a Data Center Story
The conversation’s most urgent theme is electricity. Data centers dominate the headlines, and for good reason. The Department of Energy reports that data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and could reach 6.7 to 12 percent by 2028. But Griffiths argues the power crunch reaches every warehouse, not just the hyperscale campuses. Electric forklifts, automated storage and retrieval systems, EV fleet charging, and on-site robotics are converting buildings that once needed modest service into facilities competing for megawatts. A warehouse designed around 1,200 amps a decade ago may need several multiples of that to support the automation its next tenant requires.
That shift is already repricing assets. As we explored in our analysis of valuing Chicago data centers and adjacent properties, the institutional standard for power-intensive real estate has moved from dollars per square foot to dollars per kilowatt, and properties near committed utility infrastructure carry a measurable premium. The politics are moving just as fast. In Illinois, Champaign County approved a one-year moratorium on large-scale data centers while lawmakers debate statewide regulation, and the governor has proposed pausing the state’s data center tax incentives. For industrial owners, the takeaway is simple: power capacity is becoming a primary underwriting variable, and entitled, energized land is the scarcest commodity in the market.
The Last-Mile Paradox
Griffiths and Lamphere also dig into a contradiction at the heart of modern logistics. Consumers expect same-day and next-day delivery, yet the warehouses that make that speed possible face mounting community opposition. Moratoriums and restrictive zoning that began with warehouses in places like Southern California and New Jersey have now jumped to data centers, and the pattern is identical: everyone wants the service, nobody wants the building. For occupiers, that resistance constrains supply in precisely the infill locations where rent-to-revenue math works best. Griffiths frames the occupier decision clearly: when a well-located building lets a tenant reach more customers faster, the incremental rent is often trivial against the revenue it unlocks.
The squeeze on close-in land is also driving demand for trailer storage and industrial outdoor storage, a theme Griffiths flags when he points listeners toward the IOS world. Chicagoland is living that story right now, as we documented in our look at how Chicago’s truck parking problem is reshaping industrial real estate. The result, Griffiths predicts, is a bifurcation of industrial users: automated, power-hungry, location-critical operations on one side, and price-sensitive commodity storage pushed to the periphery on the other.
Doomers, Gurus, and 32 Ways to Calculate a Cap Rate
The episode’s most candid stretch tackles real estate social media. Griffiths sees two toxic extremes: gurus selling effortless wealth, and doomers selling collapse. Both profit from exaggeration, and both distort how investors perceive risk. His antidote is unglamorous honesty, even when doomerism gets the views. His cap rate documentary makes the point empirically. He asked a dozen seasoned professionals to define and calculate a cap rate, and no two agreed. By his count there are more than thirty defensible ways to run the number, depending on how you treat vacancy, capital reserves, management, and trailing versus forward income. The lesson for investors is not that cap rates are useless, but that any single quoted figure is a compressed argument. Ask what is behind the number before you trade on it.
Ten Years Out: Vertical, Automated, Ultra-High-Clear
Asked to look a decade ahead, Griffiths predicts distribution goes vertical: multi-level, heavily automated buildings with clear heights far beyond today’s 40-foot standard, super-flat floors engineered for robotics, and power infrastructure as the gating constraint. Chicago has already run an early experiment on this thesis, and the results were humbling. As we covered when Chicago’s first vertical warehouse hit the market empty, construction costs north of $300 per buildable square foot collide with rents that do not yet support them. Griffiths’ argument is that automation changes the math: when machines rather than people move the goods, cubic feet replace square feet as the unit of production, and the buildings that can deliver height, flatness, and megawatts will command the premium.
If you are weighing an industrial lease, acquisition, or disposition anywhere in Chicagoland, the themes in this episode are already shaping your market. The team at Van Vlissingen and Co. has guided occupiers, owners, and investors through every industrial cycle since 1879, and our brokers can help you evaluate power capacity, location strategy, and asset positioning across the region. Explore current opportunities on our Chicagoland industrial space page, catch every new episode on the Real Finds Podcast hub, and call 847-846-6902 to talk with an advisor today.