Jack Storry, Director

I've been brokering commercial real estate in the Twin Cities for the better part of a decade, with the last several years narrowed almost entirely to flex office and light industrial in the southwest metro. The submarkets I cover — Eden Prairie, Bloomington, Minnetonka, and St. Louis Park — are the ones I've walked enough buildings in to have an opinion on individual landlords, building managers, and where the soft spots in any given lease tend to live.

I work out of Monarch CRE, a tenant-side brokerage based in the Twin Cities. The firm's structure means I'm not pulled across product types or geographies I don't know — I'm not the right person to call on a downtown office tower or a 200,000 SF distribution box, and I'd say so on the first call.

The short version: landlords have full-time professional representation. Tenants who don't, negotiate against pros without one. The cost of a tenant rep — to the tenant — is zero. Brokerage commissions are a line item in the lease, paid by the landlord, baked into the deal whether you bring a broker or not.

The longer version is about what shows up after the term sheet. Operating expense pass-throughs, holdover language, restoration obligations, expansion and contraction rights, sublet consent standards. These are the parts of a lease that read like boilerplate and aren't, and a generalist attorney reviewing two flex deals a year doesn't always catch the language that's drifted in the landlord's favor over the last two cycles.

A good tenant rep gets you a competitive search, a defensible market read, and lease language that holds up when the building changes hands or your business changes shape. That's it.

Monarch CRE is a tenant-side firm, which means we don't represent landlords in the markets we cover for tenants. That removes a category of conflict that a lot of larger shops manage around but can't fully resolve. It also means our incentive structure is simple: tenant-side brokers, paid on tenant-side deals, accountable to the tenant.

The firm is small and local. Decisions on how a deal gets run sit with the broker working it. There's no committee structure that slows down a search or a negotiation, and no national mandate pulling attention away from the Twin Cities.