Dear CBG Members and other interested parties:

Smart Growth Greater Madison is in search for its next Executive Director. Smart Growth is encouraging the Madison Real Estate community to help us identify qualified candidates who share our commitment to advancing responsible real estate development and advocating for policies that support a strong and thriving Greater Madison community.

If you know someone within your professional network who may be well suited for this opportunity, please share the position announcement below or encourage them to contact Matt Brink or Bill Connors directly.

Contact emails:
bill@smartgrowthgreatermadison.com
mbrink@veridianhomes.com

Executive Director Position Announcement:

https://www.indeed.com/job/executive-director-047947fb357ee598

Thank you!

Ben Filkouski
CBG Past-President

The Facade Improvement Grant Program provides matching grants, up to $50,000, to small business owners and tenants to assist them in restoring or beautifying their facades or storefronts.

The Facade Improvement Grant Program was established to support and encourage small business to reinvest in the downtown and neighborhood business districts. Attractive building facades support and encourage local businesses. They can have a significant effect on the attractiveness and marketability of the surrounding area. To encourage business owners to reinvest in the downtown and smaller, neighborhood business areas, the City of Madison is offering grants to assist in the exterior renovations of these otherwise sound and vital properties.

The City of Madison has awarded 99 Facade Improvement Grants, totaling $1,285,200, plus $2,503,800 in private funds were invested in the improvement and beautification of Madison business districts...

Building Improvement Grant

Deep in Arizona's Yuma Desert, Gil Michel-Garcia has spent the past four years trying to develop one of the first U.S. cobalt processing facilities.

Michel-Garcia, a co-founder of EVelution Energy, has already lined up a major customer to buy $850M of the cobalt products the plant will produce, a critical mineral used in electric vehicle batteries, microchips and jet engines. The $450M project has commitments for $345M of debt financing, but EVelution wants to tap a renewed federal tax incentive to attract equity investors.

So Michel-Garcia and his partners put together a presentation to tout their project to local officials, hoping it would be included in the latest round of nominations for the federal opportunity zone program...

The city of Madison is making progress on the housing front, as total net new homes through the first nine months of the year have already surpassed the total for all of 2025, according to the latest update to city’s Housing Tracker.

The tracker shows a total of 2,424 net new homes of all types have been completed through Sept. 30, compared to 2,328 net new homes completed in all of 2025.

Net new homes include total new homes created minus demolitions.

The Housing Tracker counts each individual dwelling unit — a single-family home, a duplex, or an apartment unit — as a home.

With 4,750 new homes completed since the Housing Tracker was launched in 2025, Madison is now 32% of the way to its goal of 15,000 new homes by 2030...

HOUSING TRACKER

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Drone photography can give buyers a perspective that traditional real estate photography cannot. Aerial photos and videos can showcase acreage, waterfront, outbuildings, landscaping and the relationship of a property to its surroundings.

But before launching a drone to get the perfect listing photo, REALTORS^® should remember that drones are aircraft regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). And when a drone is being used to create real estate advertising, the flight generally is not considered recreational.

It's the purpose of the flight that matters

A common misconception is that the FAA rules for non-recreational drone operations apply only when someone is paid to operate the drone. That is not the case...

Utility costs drive much of the opposition

MADISON, Wis. (WMTV) - A new farm market on Madison’s west side is giving small Wisconsin farmers another place to sell their products while giving customers another way to shop local.

Grandad’s Farm Stop opened just over a week ago, but owner and operator Patrick Randolph said the idea started about six years earlier while he was helping manage a small CSA farm in Dunn, Wisconsin.

“We were growing so well but didn’t have anywhere to sell it,” Randolph said. The farm’s owners were able to donate what they could not sell, but Randolph began wondering what would happen if he had a farm of his own and could not afford to do the same.

That led to the idea behind Grandad’s: a place where farmers could drop off what they grow and have someone else sell it for them...

Oct. 27

The U.S. hotel industry reported a 21st consecutive week of positive year-over-year comparisons, according to CoStar’s latest data.

For the week of Aug. 30-Sept. 5 (percentage change from comparable week in 2025):

• Occupancy: 63 percent (+9.4 percent)
• Average daily rate: $159.19 (+6.1 percent)
• Revenue per available room: $100.31 (+16.1 percent)

Year-over-year growth was elevated by the Labor Day calendar shift.

Week over week, occupancy was down 1.7 percent, ADR increased 1.3 percent and RevPAR declined 0.4 percent. The rate growth offset most of the occupancy decline, and the $2.05 increase in ADR helped limit the decrease in RevPAR.

Top Markets

Among CoStar’s top 25 markets, Minneapolis saw the largest gains in occupancy (+23.2 percent to 64.9 percent) and RevPAR (+35.7 percent to $87.52)...

It’s likely the end of the road for the Wonder Bar after Madison’s Plan Commission unanimously approved an application this month to tear down one of the city’s more storied buildings and redevelop its site.

Demolition of the Wonder Bar, along with the nearby Coliseum Bar across from Olin Park, would allow for redevelopment of the property, which has sat vacant for five years. This summer, Range Hill Partners presented initial plans to build a seven-story apartment building with roughly 190 units. Apartments would range from studio to three-bedroom units, and the building would have over 1,600 square feet of ground-floor commercial space.

Range Hill’s Dan Kennelly, a Bay Creek neighborhood resident, said the location at the intersection of Olin Avenue and John Nolen Drive is “an important location in the city” and the project is in line with the city’s comprehensive plan for the area, which calls for denser mixed-use development.

A former startup CFO explains why the real investment isn’t the beer. It’s the real estate.

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As market conditions evolve, the greatest opportunity in commercial real estate may lie in improving the buildings that already exist.

The report from consulting firm Bain & Co. projects that the artificial intelligence industry will need to generate $6T in annual revenue by 2031 to justify the unprecedented wave of capital pouring into data center development.

Existing AI services — both consumer-facing products and enterprise AI applications — could generate up to $1.8T of that total, the report’s authors estimate. But that leaves a $4.2T gap in annual revenues that will have to emerge in the next four and a half years...

Developer and Madison native Julian Walters on Wednesday opened the 44 unit Park Lofts building that includes apartments and services for young adults who have aged out of foster care, according to a report in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Walters, president of Eminent Development Corp., was born into foster care and led the development of the $17 million facility, located at 1150 S. Park St.

Of the 44 units, 11 are dedicated to young adults who are former foster care youths and there is space for the support services of JustDane, which advocates for underserved populations.

Seven of the 11 units are already leased...

Galway Companies said Thursday it has begun construction on the Greenline, a 357-unit luxury apartment home community in Monona.

The Greenline community, which will also have approximately 16,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, is the largest project in company history and in the city of Monona’s history.

Located at 1709 W. Broadway, it will incorporate a central park, a year-round public gathering place for farmers’ markets, outdoor concerts and movie nights...

The commercial real estate industry does not lack for market data. Vacancy rates, absorption figures, rent growth, cap rate movement, and transaction volume all get tracked closely and published on a reliable cadence. What most of that data has in common is that it describes conditions that already exist. By the time a vacancy rate moves, the leases driving it were signed months earlier, and the decisions behind those leases were made earlier still.

The National Association of REALTORS launched a Commercial Real Estate Demand Index in August that attempts to work further upstream. Rather than measuring the property market, it measures the local economic activity that eventually produces demand for space, covering 306 metropolitan statistical areas on a quarterly basis with history back to 2022.

“We are not measuring vacancy, transactions, or rent growth. Those are important but we want things that are leading up to those,” said Nadia Evangelou, Principal Economist and Director of Real Estate Research at the National Association of REALTORS. “Two markets might have the same vacancy rate but one might be growing and one might be completely stagnant.”...

How unpopular are large data centers in Wisconsin?

Very unpopular, as 74% of voters in a new poll said they believe the costs of data centers outweigh their benefits.

The poll, released Wednesday by the Marquette University Law School, said opposition to large data centers is up nearly 20 points from the 55% that opposed them a year ago.

For data center operators, the news is actually better than it was a month ago in the Marquette poll, when 78% opposed them...

SEE ALL LISTINGS HERE

Industrial Sector Moves Toward Balance From Oversupply

While market performance remains uneven geographically, the industrial real estate sector as a whole continues its transitional trend from the supply excess of the start of the pandemic to a more balanced phase.

Despite the various headwinds of recent years — such as the tariffs situation, economic uncertainty and the spike in energy prices — demand for industrial space has remained relatively solid, largely due to investment in supply chain resiliency and distribution networks...

Key Takeaways:

• The construction pipeline grew 32% year-over-year (Y-o-Y) from more than 338 million square feet in August 2025 to nearly 447 million square feet in August 2026.
• Year-to-date industrial sales reached nearly $60.5 billion, a 40% increase Y-o-Y
• The average leasing rate across top markets was up 5.4% year-over-year in August.
• Inland Empire, Calif., industrial rents grew by nearly 7% in a 12-month period.
• Columbus, Ohio, vacancies reach 7.5% following 600-basis-point (bps) year-over-year decrease.
• Year-to-date industrial sales volume in Tampa, Fla., doubles in August, hitting $1 billion.

Regional Highlights:

• Sale prices in Los Angeles went up 9% Y-o-Y to approach $300 per square foot.
• Indianapolis commands the highest regional premiums on new leases.
• Construction activity more than doubled year-over-year in Charlotte, N.C., and Baltimore.
• New Jersey topped year-to-date sales in the Northeast, while Boston commanded the highest average sale price per square foot in the region.

I’ve spent my career telling you not to be afraid of technology. I meant it when the desktop computer and then the internet showed up. I meant it when smartphones arrived. And I mean it today when I tell you artificial intelligence may be the most important thing humans have ever built. I use it every single day.

Something is happening right now that you need to understand. Some of the people building the most powerful AI on Earth are warning that one day we could lose control of it. 

Not villains. Not doomsday YouTubers. The engineers.

The guy who walked out

On September 8, a researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, the company behind Claude. He spent about three years between Anthropic and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, most of it at OpenAI. He quit before his stock vested. That’s like walking out the week before your bonus hits.

His goodbye post got more than 90 million views in a day. The line everyone shared: the big AI companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”...

At Essen Haus, beer steins hang from the ceiling, waitstaff wear lederhosen and dirndls, and polka music plays from the small dining-room stage. The downtown restaurant is a showcase of Wisconsin’s lasting German cultural heritage, and since it opened in 1983, Essen Haus has been a gathering place for everyone from families to local fraternity brothers.

The menu includes some American fare, like the Reuben or the Philly steak sandwich, but the most popular offerings are German classics, like rouladen (thinly sliced beef rolled around meats and vegetables and smothered in gravy) and käsespätzle (noodles with cheese and ham).

“It’s Wisconsin, [so] of course people come in for bratwursts,” says general manager Neale Hansen. Essen Haus delivers with its Wurst Teller, a trio of German sausages served with sauerkraut and house-made sauces like hot-and-sweet mustard and curry ketchup.

It’s no secret that Germany is also known for its beer, and Hansen goes so far as to say it’s the best in the world. Naturally, Essen Haus boasts a long list of tap beers, including pilsners, lagers and German styles like weiss beers and Oktoberfest beers.

At Essen Haus, a meal or drink often comes with a side of live entertainment. While Thursdays bring a mixed bag of genres, from jazz to country music, Fridays and Saturdays are reserved for polka. “It’s in the DNA of the business,” Hansen says.

CARW Deal of the Year Awards and Annual Meeting

It was Thanksgiving week in 2022 — a time when most employees are hard to find, let alone critical pieces of data center power infrastructure. And Kurt Bogle needed a transformer.

Bogle, then a senior regional director of critical facilities operations at NTT Global Data Centers, oversaw seven operational buildings around Chicago and Virginia and a staff of about 150 people. After a transformer failed a test, Bogle had to find a replacement and coordinate a swap with the on-site managers — all without disrupting service.

The former General Motors plant in Janesville was a cornerstone of the city’s economy for decades, peaking at more than 7,100 workers in 1977 before the main assembly line closed in 2008 during the Great Recession.

The factory was ultimately torn down and the 250-acre site, which was also home to Janesville Auto Transport Co., still sits idle today. It may remain unused for years longer if a referendum on the city’s Nov. 3 ballot passes.

A group called “No Janesville Data Center” was part of what persuaded members of the Janesville City Council to drop a developer’s plan for an 11-building data center campus this year.

Emboldened by that victory, which was partly due to lack of public transparency, the same “No” group is now behind a referendum to limit how much could be invested to pump new life into the GM/JATCO site...

Lawsuits against multifamily landlords over mold and habitability are on the rise.

The issue of mold in the U.S. housing stock is a growing one as properties age and rising costs lead to deferred maintenance. Keeping properties free of the fungus is crucial to maintaining tenant health. 

At the same time, increased risk of lawsuits has driven up the cost of habitability insurance, pushing some carriers out of states like California. As a result, some landlords find themselves in a situation where they can face substantial legal costs without a sufficient backstop. 

Microsoft is targeting 38GW of capacity in 2032, currently operating around 12GW of data centre capacity, according to a report from Bloomberg

A footprint built for growth

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The AI power pledge was signed in a room named for broken promises. Is the Ratepayer Protection Pledge as good as a broken treaty?

A report predicts electricity demand on the regional grid will nearly double by 2040, due almost entirely to data centers.

Vacancy in the Madison life science market increased slightly to 4% but remains low, according to the latest Life Science Market Overview published by Broadwing Advisors.

The report, released Wednesday, said the 4% vacancy rate represents 193,229 vacant square feet for the market’s 89 lab properties, which total nearly 4.8 million square feet.

A vacancy rate of under 5% is indicative of strong tenant demand, but it is not always a foolproof sign of a healthy commercial real estate market.

The Broadwing report said Dane County’s low vacancy rate limits companies’ ability to quickly accommodate growth. Most available lab space is predominantly located in University Research Park and the west submarket.

With striking speed, the widespread debate around data centers has become a fault line in American communities, cutting across political parties, splitting constituencies and forging unexpected alliances.

In city halls and county commission chambers, east to west and north to south, people are squaring off against their local representatives.

It starts with distrust

Data centers have "upended politics as we know it," says Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It's more than a not-in-my-backyard issue, he says — it also reflects existential fears that artificial intelligence will take jobs or eliminate humanity entirely...

Hoteliers are sighing in relief as the latest industry data shows positive recovery momentum.

For the fourth time this year, hotel revenue per available room rates have seen a double-digit year-over-year gain. 

During the week of Sept. 13-19, the industry reported a 10.4% year-over-year RevPAR increase, according to data released by CoStar. The average daily rate was up 5.7% to $179.30, the highest nominal weekly ADR ever recorded in the U.S...

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The initiative, dubbed “Project Mercury,” would expand Amazon's same-day fulfillment center network to more than 1,000 locations by 2031, up from around 85 facilities today, Business Insider reported, citing internal planning documents reviewed by the outlet.

The project would create shorter distances between Amazon customers and same-day delivery distribution centers, aiming to create a network that is within a 10-mile straight-line radius from 80% of Amazon’s Prime customers, BI reported. That puts inventory closer to customers, including Amazon's grocery items, which generate more than $150B annually...

The athleisure retailer is set to take up about 12K SF in the Magnificent Mile at the corner of North Michigan Avenue and East Illinois Street, Crain's Chicago Business reported. Lululemon also has six other Chicago locations.

Interim co-CEO Meghan Frank said on an earnings call earlier this month that Lululemon plans to take a "very measured" approach to store expansion. It plans to open a net 35 new stores this year...

Tech leaders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman have supported space “data centers” as a potential solution to terrestrial troubles.

Soaring 10-year Treasury yields have thrown ice-cold water on CRE’s typically unrelenting optimism.

The key economic benchmark hit 5.3% on Wednesday afternoon, reaching its highest level since 2002 at the end of its biggest quarterly increase since 1994. As the 10-year climbed, some of the industry’s largest players — already battered by high construction costs, inflation and geopolitical upheaval — watched the historic upswing from Bisnow’s National Commercial Real Estate Finance Event and agreed that times were about to get a lot tougher...

Total sales volume in August was $107B, boosted by $70B in M&A-type sales, according to MSCI. Megadeals lifted transaction volume 127% year-over-year in August, but total sales excluding M&A were down roughly 21% compared to last year.

M&A deal volume was at a record pace for a single month in August, and the data reflects a highly liquid market, but one where the expansion of deal volume is slowing, MSCI analysts wrote. 

Rising interest rates and the shifting capital markets environment were unlikely to have scuttled many deals in August but could put pressure on activity in the months ahead, analysts at JPMorgan Chase wrote in a note to investors...

Nearly $3B of CMBS loans are tied to 174 U.S. industrial properties where FedEx is the anchor tenant, according to a Trepp analysis. There is $837M of debt, or 29% of that balance, backed by properties where FedEx’s leases are set to expire before the loans mature.

The report highlights how much of the securitized industrial debt market is tied to two companies: FedEx and Amazon.

Combined, they anchor properties tied to $6.6B of CMBS loans, nearly 10% of the $68.9B total outstanding CMBS debt backed by warehouses that are leased to identifiable tenants, according to Trepp. That is more exposure than the next 10 tenants combined...

From 2017 to 2019 the national median rent increased by an average of 2.5 percent per year; if that trend had continued from 2020 through present, the median monthly rent would sit at $1,395 as of August 2026. The actual median rent in August 2026 is $1,390, just barely below that projected level. Rents may have skyrocketed in 2021 and 2022, but the gradual cooldown of the ensuing years has now offset those increases to the extent that the national median rent has converged back to a long-run trend of slow and steady growth.

Key Takeaways

• As of August 2026, the national median rent sits at $1,390, almost exactly where it would have been if rent growth since 2020 had remained on the slow and steady trajectory it had been on pre-pandemic ($1,395).
  
  
• Since 2020, the rental market has whipplashed between skyrocketing rents and price declines, and those alternating hot and cold spells have now offset each other such that rent growth over the past six and half years as a whole averages out to an annual pace of 2.5 percent per year.
  
  
• This national finding masks significant regional variation. In the Buffalo, NY metro, the median rent is 37% higher than it would have been had rents increased at a typical rate, whereas in the Austin, TX metro, rents are 15% below that level.

Nike signed a 43,000-square-foot lease for two floors at the Shops at North Bridge at 540 North Michigan Avenue, which was vacated by fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 in 2018.

Nike is going to be moving out of 663 North Michigan Avenue, its larger current location, soon.

The deal comes at a time when the availability rate on the Magnificent Mile is dipping amidst a rebound for Chicago's luxury retail corridor. The Mag Mile's availability rate was 26.1 percent in July, down from all-time highs of 33.8 percent that were notched in 2023, according to Crain's. Availability rate differs from vacancy rate, but only slightly: it denotes the empty space and the space that will soon lose its tenant with nothing else lined up.

          

	The Gialamas Company, Inc.	RFA Asset Management Madison, WI	Key Commercial Real Estate, LLC
Madison Commercial Real Estate LLC	St. John Properties	IA Management, LLC	Wisconsin Commercial Real Estate
Park Towne Realty LLC	Mullins Group, LLC	Crown Commercial	Flad Development & Investment Corp.
Evans Properties, LLC	Keller Real Estate Group		MIG Commercial Real Estate, LLC
First Weber Group, Inc - West Towne	Opitz Realty, Inc.	First Weber Group, Inc - Prairie Du Sac
The Lenhart Company, Inc	Scott Faust & Associates	Shamrock Real Estate Services, LLC	Targa, Inc
Executive Management, Inc	Stark Commercial - East	Urban Land Interests	Slinde Realty Company
Assist-2-Sell/Pohlkamp & Associates	Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Matson Real Estate	Artisan Graham Real Estate

Hovde & Hovde, Inc