CHICAGO-Business consultant MorrisAnderson has formed a joint venture with Northbrook, IL-based Frontline Real Estate Partners to complement each other for new customers. MorrisAnderson has wanted to jump into the real estate industry, and CRE advisory firm Frontline, which has specialized in distressed assets, can find property solutions.

“Every business has real estate issues,” says Mitch Kahn with Frontline. “Even washing machine firms have properties to deal with.”The partnership was already working together before being an official JV, he tells GlobeSt.com. Frontline has joined MorrisAnderson on such projects as the restructuring of the Minneapolis-based Granite City Food & Brewery leases, providing expert-witness testimony on behalf of the bankrupt Dime Building in Detroit, and consulting on the Opus Northwest restructuring.

Dan Dooley, CEO of MorrisAnderson, said that it will be good to add knowledge of distressed asset management and disposition to his company’s services list. “The distressed real estate market will remain active for the next few years,” he said in a statement.

Kahn says though there hasn’t been a flood of distressed properties, as was expected because of the previous recession cycle, there has been indications that sites are starting to move. “In the past 120 days, we’ve seen certain categories of assets being priced aggressively,” he says.

However, the Kahn says the spread is still too wide, the spread of what a good asset will go for as compared to a few years ago, and what an empty building will go for versus a few years ago. “I don’t think we’re going to see a substantial comeback for awhile, we’ll be mostly hanging around the bottom for a couple of years until we see better job growth,” he says.