CHICAGO—Some 100 brokers, business cards at the ready, swapped asset information in the hopes of moving deals forward. Simultaneously, they painted a picture of opportunities market-by-market in a fast-moving, highly interactive  Investment Property Marketplace session at SIOR’s Fall World Congress here on Friday.

Generically, for office and industrial alike, core properties are trading at 7 to 8% unlevered IRR and a cap rate of 5.5 to 6%. Value-add, on the other hand, is trading at 16-20% levered IRR and a 7.5 to 8.5% cap rate.

But generics don’t take into account specific markets and as panelist Jeremy Giles from ProLogis pointed out, “What’s core in the Meadowlands isn’t necessarily core in Elk Grove Village.” That sparked a prolonged conversation on terms, to which Giles responded: “Value add is not just a problem such as a weaker market,” Giles said. “It’s a value story to be told.”

“Our definition of core is best of location and best of quality,” said Ray Kivett of American Realty Advisors. But recently “we’ve seen a 10% dip in overheated core stuff.” And while most panelists agreed that market-to-market core plus was harder to pin down, “Kivet offered: “It’s a great location but maybe with a leasing challenge.”

Then the discussion between panelists and attendees—some 100 in all—turned to a sampling of markets from a random selection of representatives in the room. A Cassidy Turley broker described Northern California as “hot. One of the tech capitals of the word and home to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”  He also pinned East Bay and Silicon Valley cap rates at “Sub 6.” He added that institutional-size industrial in the area is going for $125 per foot while office is topping out at $600.

Houston, one broker stated, “performed really well during the downturn” and is even starting to support some spec builds. A sign of its power is that some 40% of the post-recessionary national employment growth has come out of Texas.

Southern Florida is seeing rental rates going up for A and B product while C is still struggling.  Despite the uppertier hike, “rents are still off 15%,” noted a local broker.

Buyers in Chicago are “chasing core hard,” said an area rep. Larger value-add deals are being underwritten to an 8% yield.

But one broker, a WP Carey representative, put a cap on the various takes on what makes good core or value add, on what markets are hot and which are not.  At the end of the day, he cut to (you should excuse the expression) the core of the issue: “We’ll buy a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield, and we don’t care if it’s core or value-add. What we’re looking for is credit-worthiness.”