Sellers still aren’t cutting price, and deals are closing anyway. At a recent San Francisco broker meetup hosted by Crexi, four active buyers explained how terms, not pricing, have become the real negotiation.

Key takeaways

• The bid-ask gap hasn’t closed, it’s moved. Buyers meet seller pricing in exchange for concessions elsewhere.
• Extended closing timelines, early deposit release, and pre-closing access for renovation and leasing are the levers buyers described pulling in place of price.
• The “gap” isn’t uniform — it looks completely different across industrial, retail, and multifamily, and in some corners it’s inverted.
• Ground-up development has become increasingly hard to pencil, pushing investors to get more creative about where value-add opportunity comes from.
• Structure can reduce execution risk, but it can’t rescue a basis that doesn’t work.

Moderated by Adam Siegel, Crexi’s VP of Product Growth, the panel brought together Maarten Deschaumes of Lands End Capital, Don Tepman of TownCentre Capital, Alex Brenner of Terreno Realty, and John McNellis of McNellis Partners. Siegel framed the session with a specific goal: not another market overview, but a candid look at what actually gets a buy decision across the finish line today.

The answer had less to do with price discovery than with how deals are built.

The bid-ask gap didn’t close — it moved

Deschaumes, founder and managing partner of Lands End Capital, a San Francisco Bay Area investment manager, summed up his approach in a line he repeats often: my price, your terms, or your price, my terms.

“There are a lot of sellers who are stuck on their price, and they can’t seem to let go of it, of what they want, and there are other levers to pull outside of price.”

Maarten Deschaumes, Lands End Capital

Price is one variable in the negotiation, not the negotiation itself. The terms that increasingly determine whether a deal closes include:

• How long the buyer has to close
• When the deposit releases
• Pre-closing access
• Extension options

For sellers who can’t or won’t take a lower number, often because they don’t want to book the loss, these concessions cost nothing at closing. For buyers, they can be worth more than a price reduction.

Early access is the most valuable concession

Roughly 80 percent of what Deschaumes’ firm does is multifamily and mixed-use, he said, and it mostly buys vacant buildings — which means returns hinge on lease-up speed. So he negotiates for lease-up to begin before he owns the building.

A representative structure: six months to close, deposit released after thirty days, seller indemnified, and the buyer permitted to market units for lease and begin renovation work during escrow. The goal is to close on a building that is already performing rather than one that needs a year of work to get there.

“We’ll indemnify sellers and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to start renovating some of your units in escrow, and start pre-leasing a lot of these units. We have a full building at close of escrow.’”

Maarten Deschaumes, Lands End Capital

Sellers who will not move on price, he has found, are willing to grant that access.

McNellis described the same principle applied to ground-up development. His team chased a three-to-four-acre site where the seller wouldn’t move on price.

“We just chipped and chipped and chipped, and we couldn’t move the price at all. But we finally got them to take crazy good terms for us.”

John McNellis, McNellis Partners

What they secured instead: the better part of a year of free option time, extensions priced at essentially nothing, and no obligation to close until a building permit is in hand.

The seller got their number; the buyer got the concession they cared about.

Why the pressure is landing on structure

Panelists pointed to two forces pushing capital toward creative structuring.

First, McNellis says ground-up has gotten hard to pencil. Ground-up development “just does not work” anymore, he told the room, and traced the crowding into value-add directly back to it.

Second, value-add supply is thinner than it looks. Tepman, who has been buying strip centers since 2006, is blunt about how crowded the category has become. “Everyone wants value add right now, and I don’t think a lot of people even know what that means,” he said.

“A lot of sellers want all that value that you’re going to create, they want you to pay for it now, so they want me to work for free in a sense.”

Don Tepman, TownCentre Capital

The cause, in his telling: value-add supply is a function of fear, and leasing markets are healthy enough right now that owners aren’t afraid of vacancy. No fear, no discount. Buyers who need a value-add return must manufacture their edge somewhere else, through structure, sourcing, or operations rather than basis.

On the industrial side, Brenner frames the same problem as a question of what a building can become rather than what it yields. “No longer does it make sense to just buy some big box warehouse and park capital,” he said. “Anyone can put money out the door, but I think it’s more of a question of what’s the underlying functionality of that warehouse?” Is it single-tenant by nature, or can it be carved into several? Is there a power story? Those questions decide whether a deal has a second act, and they are increasingly what buyers underwrite instead of a discount.

The gap looks different in every asset class

One of the most useful corrections from the panel: there isn’t a single bid-ask gap. Panelist described their own asset classes differently.

• Industrial is visibly bifurcated in the Bay Area and the other hot markets, Brenner says. Institutional-quality, credit-tenanted product is moving back toward 2021 levels, while older Class B vintage faces a much thinner buyer pool and a genuine spread.
• Retail is splitting the same way, Tepman says. Well-capitalized public buyers, whose lower cost of capital lets them bid aggressively, have reset comps at the stabilized end and pulled seller expectations upward across weaker product.
• Multifamily has partly inverted, Deschaumes says. Stabilized assets are richly bid, while fully vacant value-add buildings requiring gut renovation draw fewer competing bidders — allowing his firm to buy at $200 to $350 per foot against rents of $70 to $80 per foot, with roughly $10 per foot in operating expenses.

Deschaumes gave the room a live measure of how wide the rent-knowledge gap can get. On a recent San Francisco acquisition, the listing package underwrote a four-bedroom unit at $7,000 a month. A leasing specialist placed a tenant at $20,000 a month at close of escrow, moving the deal from roughly a 10 percent return on cost to about 17 percent.

For brokers, the practical implication is that “where’s the market?” is a submarket-and-vintage question, not a national one, and buyers notice when the answer is delivered with that specificity. Brenner frames it as a shared job.

“Our job is educating sellers, especially non-institutional ones, on where’s the market today. Interest rates have moved, vacancies moved. It just is a different market.”

Alex Brenner, Terreno Realty

He adds: “I think credibility matters. If you are an active buyer, people see that.” His team tries to give sellers context around a number rather than simply delivering it, on the theory that a reasoned offer is harder to dismiss as a lowball.

Where creative structure hits its limit

None of the four panelists suggested terms can rescue a deal that doesn’t work.

McNellis chased a shuttered drugstore box against his firm’s standing test — a free-and-clear return roughly 200 basis points above the expected exit cap — and came out roughly $2 million below the seller’s number. They walked away.

Deschaumes applies an equally hard filter, and he needs the answer inside the first three months of ownership. “If we can’t solve a double-digit return on cost, we have to pass,” he said. “That’s our litmus test.”

Brenner’s team passed on a fully leased Fremont building in what he called probably the hottest industrial market in the country — because the mark-to-market story didn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Creative structure buys time and reduces execution risk. It does not make an unsustainable rent assumption sustainable.

Where the deal comes from still matters

When asked how deals reach them, no one pointed to a single channel. Tepman’s most recent acquisition came both ways — he’d seen it listed, and the broker called him to explain why it was worth buying. What he wanted the brokers in the room to notice was the listing: the deal had been sitting on Crexi, he said, and anyone in the room refreshing the site could have bought it.

The same instinct runs through his leasing, where his team spent $30,000 last quarter sending site plans, brochures and TI packages by FedEx to prospective nail salon, hair salon and gym tenants — a channel he says produces a 100 percent open rate. Listing exposure sits alongside that, not instead of it. The approach is layered; no single channel carries the business.

The sourcing side tells the same story. Deschaumes built his early pipeline by working ownership data directly rather than waiting for packages to arrive, and roughly half of his first thirty transactions closed with no broker involved at all. He goes direct when a broker can’t add something to the transaction, which is precisely why the brokers who do bring real information keep their seat at the table. Brenner’s point is the same from the other side: a deal that arrives without anyone checking which six markets his company operates in is a wasted send.

That is the through-line. If price is the least flexible term on the page, the edge is information: knowing the buyer’s real constraint, knowing what rents the market will actually pay, and knowing who owns the asset before your competition does. Ownership records, sales comps and submarket pricing are the raw material for all three.

What this means for brokers

If sellers are immovable on price and buyers are disciplined on returns, the transaction gets unlocked by whoever identifies which non-price concession is worth the most to a specific buyer.

Asked directly what a broker could do differently in the next 90 days, the answers clustered into two themes: show up in person, and know the specific buyer you are showing up for. Taken with the rest of the conversation, four suggestions emerge:

• Pick up the phone, and show up. Tepman measures inputs: 15 broker conversations a day per team member, calls rather than texts. McNellis would go further: knock on the door, or mail the package with a handwritten note, on the theory that everyone reads the handwritten notes they get.
• Learn each buyer’s real constraint, not just their asset criteria. A vacant-building buyer needs pre-closing leasing access. A developer needs a permit contingency. A REIT needs a defensible mark-to-market. Deschaumes calls his return on cost the guiding star: show him a clear path to it and he will look at almost anything.
• Bring sellers the trade, not just the number. Telling a seller they can hold their price if they’ll give up the calendar is a more productive conversation than another round of chipping.
• Get the rent number right. Brenner named unsupportable rent assumptions as the fastest route to a pass. The advantage belongs to whoever knows the real number.

The panel’s most concrete advice for brokers came from Deschaumes. No single data source is perfect, he said — but a broker who cross-references several of them can build their own picture of who owns what, what it last traded for, and who hasn’t refinanced in five years. It is exactly the work that would make a broker indispensable to him now. The buyers on that stage aren’t waiting for a package. They’re waiting for someone who did the work first.

Come to the conversation prepared: get the deal data you need with Crexi.