Your competitor's growth lead already saw the spend spike.
While your team is still in standup, the other growth lead already got the alert. Viktor is an AI employee that lives in Slack. It watches your Meta and TikTok spend overnight, flags the underperformer by 7am, and drafts the new brief before your first meeting.
The buyer and seller never have the same information, and that gap is where the entire return lives.
“Which market?”
That’s my honest answer when someone asks how the Indianapolis market is doing. The question assumes one market. We have at least three, and they’re each standing in a different part of the cycle.
The Fundamentals
Real estate cycles run more pronounced than the broader economy’s, for two reasons. Supply is lumpy: a building approved in a boom delivers years later, often into a slowdown. And information is unevenly held.
Real estate overshoots the economy in both directions, and each property type runs its own clock. Knowing the phase you’re buying into matters as much as the price you’re paying.
What I’m Watching
Industrial: vacancy sits near 9% and the metro absorbed 3.3 million square feet in Q1 while digesting a historic wave of bulk deliveries, per CBRE. That’s a market working through oversupply toward balance, fast.
Office: 21.2% vacant metro-wide, and downtown printed a record 27.7%, per Colliers. Meanwhile Class A in Carmel, Fishers, and Keystone keeps leasing. Same property type, two different phases, 15 minutes apart.
Retail: Q1 net absorption was roughly flat, but necessity retail stays tight on the back of roughly 55,000 net new residents and almost nothing new being built, per Cushman & Wakefield. Late-cycle stability, held up by population.
Three property types, three phases. A single “Indy cap rate” conversation papers over all of it.
A Deal That Crossed My Desk
February. A vacant 21,000-square-foot, two-building retail-industrial complex on 3 acres in a strong urban submarket, asking $90 per square foot against retail comps trading near $196.
A 54% discount in a submarket that strong is the market telling you something. Here it was three somethings: a former dry cleaner with solvent contamination nobody had sampled beneath, confirmed diesel impacts near an old fuel canopy with possible migration off-site, and PFAS from a 2016 foam runoff event already under a state agreed order.
I ran the sensitivity. Remediation estimates spanned $385K to $2.7M, and the projected IRR moved from 21.5% down to 2.1% across that range. The entire return lived inside the seller’s information advantage, which is exactly what the fundamentals warn about.
The property had fallen out of contract repeatedly; every buyer before me hit the same gate. Our condition was simple: bound the environmental cost below $500K and credit the difference, or we pass. The seller wouldn’t credit it, and we passed. When a seller refuses to stand behind their own discount, they’ve told you what they think the problem really costs.
If you’re underwriting anything in Indy right now, name the phase before you trust the price.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Deal details are anonymized; figures composited and rounded to protect confidentiality.
Still answering “how’s the market” with “which one,”
Ryan Cadwell
Resolute Realty Development and Management
Managing Partner
317.214.8552
resoluterdm.com
P.S. Sitting on capital and not sure where it pencils right now? That’s exactly the conversation I like having.