Real Estate Redevelopment 101 Training

Join Place + Main Advisors and Illinois Main Street in downtown Springfield for Real Estate Redevelopment 101 Training on Tuesday, October 7, 2025.

We welcome Main Street and downtown management professionals, economic developers, destination marketers, city staffers, and anyone else involved in creating vibrant places.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED. Free for IMS members | $75 for non-members

8:30 - 9:00 AM Welcome & Intros

9:00 - 9:15 AM Why Do Real Estate Redevelopment?

Why should Main Streets get involved in real estate redevelopment? This quick primer looks at several key reasons Main Street orgs should get involved.

9:15 - 10:30 AM Understanding the Real Estate Redevelopment Process

This session will focus on the steps necessary for successful real estate redevelopment. From planning to pre-development to construction, we will break down the process to understand how it all works.

10:30 - 10:45 AM Break

10:45 - 11:45 AM Evaluating Potential Sites + Real Estate Marketing 101 Review

What makes a good potential site or building for redevelopment? This session will go through the various factors from location to building components to help attendees understand what a property’s assets and liabilities are in assessing potential redevelopment. This session will also do a basic review of the Marketing 101 webinar.

11:45 AM - 1:00 PM Lunch

1:00 - 2:30 PM Pro Forma 101 + Real Estate Math

This session will give attendees the basic understanding of what pro formas are, how they work, and why they’re important.

2:30 - 3:30 PM Incentives 101

This session will also touch broadly on evaluating the need for incentives and the different potential incentives that can be used in Illinois.

3:30 - 4:00 PM Q&A

Webinars

Registered participants will receive invitations to 4 weekly webinars leading up to the in-person event.

1.) The Role of Economic Development in Main Street + The Role of Main Street in Economic Development - Understand the importance of the economic vitality point of Main Street and understand how our Main Streets support broader economic development efforts in your region.

2.) Market Data: Turning Numbers into Opportunity - We see market and demographic data all the time. This session will focus on understanding these numbers and how we can use them to tell our communities’ stories to prospective businesses.

3.) Poop in a Group: Getting Your Act Together Before You Market - Too often communities hurriedly try to market themselves without having the things in place they need to be successful. This session will focus on things a community should be doing BEFORE they recruit businesses or developers.

4.) Property Marketing 101- Understand the basics of promoting available property (buildings or land) in your district and learn techniques you can use to help these efforts.

This workshop is brought to you by Illinois Main Street, in partnership with Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity, the Driehaus Foundation, and Downtown Springfield Inc.

About

Place + Main Advisors helps communities develop into their best selves, build their future, and tell their stories. Our focus is economic development at the neighborhood, downtown, citywide and regional levels. We engage the community and infuse their passion, needs, and dreams into strategies and implementation plans that get things done. We provide high quality services, grounded in real-world experience, built on the best examples from around the country, and brought to you in a way everyone can understand. We help our clients plan out what should happen, stepby-step, to make strategies become realities. Visit placeandmain.com to learn more.

Trainer Bio

Joe Borgstrom is an accomplished professional in the fields of Downtown Redevelopment, Community and Economic Development, Main Street and Placemaking. His 20 year career includes executive management, project financial structuring and evaluation, fund development, foreign direct investment recruitment, market research, program management, public speaking and consulting. He and his teams have used state and local incentives to leverage more than $2.2 billion in private investment into communities.

Borgstrom’s expertise is in the areas of retail market analysis, real estate redevelopment, real estate finance, business recruitment, strategic planning, incentives, and economic development strategy. He has served clients in communities as small as 700 residents to more than 400,000.

He has been a featured keynote speaker at statewide downtown conferences in Wisconsin, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, and Delaware, multi-time presenter at the National Main Street Conference, and was a featured speaker at the White House Placemaking Summit.

Borgstrom is a Certified Economic Development Finance Professional through the National Development Council.

Please email Erik Reader, Director of Illinois Main Street: [email protected]

Host or Publisher Organized by the Illinois Main Street program