Who We Are
Mirlo Real Estate Partners is an Ann Arbor-based commercial real estate firm representing healthcare tenants and buyers exclusively — dentists, veterinarians, physicians, and independent practice owners across Southeast Michigan.
A lease negotiation between a landlord who negotiates for a living and a practice owner who will do this two or three times in a career is not a fair fight. Rent is likely the second or third largest expense your practice has, after payroll — and the other side of the table works on it every day. Everything about Mirlo is built to level that fight.
We work one side of the table. Mirlo never represents corporate landlords and never takes third-party listings, so every negotiation we run is built entirely around the practice — with no listing relationships to protect and no divided incentives. When walking away from a building is the right answer for your practice, we’re free to say so.
We evaluate the real estate through the lens of the practice, not the building. A listing sheet tells you the rent and the square footage; it doesn’t tell you whether the plumbing can carry operatories, whether the parking works for patient turnover, or whether the lease you sign this year will help or block the sale of your practice in fifteen. That’s the analysis we bring to every transaction.
Our team has negotiated nearly 1,300 commercial real estate transactions, and we put all of that experience on every file. We represent practices across Southeast Michigan, including Washtenaw, Oakland, Wayne, Macomb, Livingston, Monroe, Jackson, Ingham, Genesee, St. Clair, and Lenawee counties. And when a client’s deal falls outside our market, our membership in the Healthcare Realty Network — a national network of healthcare-focused brokerages — lets us connect them with a firm like ours wherever they need to be.
mirlo
/meer•low/
Like the male Red-winged Blackbird fiercely defending its territory, Mirlo embodies strength, energy, and guidance—empowering individuals and corporations to protect their interests and make the best, most impactful business decisions.
The Mirlo Story
Nick Zagar started in real estate in 2005, leasing apartments seven days a week in Harlem and Washington Heights to save enough to break into commercial. His first year in commercial real estate he made $14,000. He learned tenant representation the hard way — cold calls, mailers, knocking on office doors in Midtown South with little mentorship, making mistake after mistake. It took him three months to canvass the Empire State Building, and he got chased out more than once.
When his first child was born, Nick came home to Michigan and became the landlord’s agent for what was then Ann Arbor’s largest commercial landlord by assets under management. His name was on dozens of buildings, and he was transacting hundreds of deals a year. It was lucrative — and it showed him something he couldn’t unsee: tenants who came to his buildings with good representation got objectively better deals, on almost every term, than tenants who came alone. He was the professional on the other side of that fight, and he was tired of winning it.
In December 2020, he started Mirlo Real Estate Partners with an intentionally narrow charter: represent tenants and buyers only — never both sides — because he had watched the conflicts of interest up close. The focus tightened from there to independent healthcare providers, because dentists, veterinarians, and physicians are the most underrepresented tenants in the market: the highest stakes, the longest leases, and the least backup. That narrow focus is the whole strategy. As the saying goes: getting your focus as small as possible simplifies your thinking and crystallizes what you must do.
Our Mission
At Mirlo Real Estate Partners, our mission is to build lasting relationships, provide expert guidance, and create thriving communities through our commercial real estate brokerage. We believe that every successful transaction is more than just a deal — it’s an opportunity to improve lives, strengthen businesses, and contribute to the growth and vibrancy of the communities we serve.
We hold ourselves to a fiduciary standard — acting in the client’s interest even when it costs us a deal — because our reputation is the only asset in this business that can’t be bought back.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
Integrity first. We owe our clients a fiduciary duty, and we act on it even when it costs us short-term — the reputation is worth more than any single deal.
An educated client is the best client. We publish our playbook, teach you how your lease actually works, and give you the tools to decide — rather than asking you to trust us blind.
Nobody wins alone. We work as a team, hold each other accountable, and treat everyone in a transaction with respect — including the other side of the table.
Always learning. Every deal sharpens the next one, and we’re honest about our mistakes — that’s how nearly 1,300 transactions became a system instead of a scrapbook.
Condensed from the full Mirlo Values doc — the complete six-value version reads as internal culture material; this distillation keeps the page client-facing. The full version belongs on a future Careers page if we ever hire publicly.
What We Do
Nick Zagar started in real estate in 2005, leasing apartments seven days a week in Harlem and Washington Heights to save enough to break into commercial. His first year in commercial real estate he made $14,000. He learned tenant representation the hard way — cold calls, mailers, knocking on office doors in Midtown South with little mentorship, making mistake after mistake. It took him three months to canvass the Empire State Building, and he got chased out more than once.
When his first child was born, Nick came home to Michigan and became the landlord’s agent for what was then Ann Arbor’s largest commercial landlord by assets under management. His name was on dozens of buildings, and he was transacting hundreds of deals a year. It was lucrative — and it showed him something he couldn’t unsee: tenants who came to his buildings with good representation got objectively better deals, on almost every term, than tenants who came alone. He was the professional on the other side of that fight, and he was tired of winning it.
In December 2020, he started Mirlo Real Estate Partners with an intentionally narrow charter: represent tenants and buyers only — never both sides — because he had watched the conflicts of interest up close. The focus tightened from there to independent healthcare providers, because dentists, veterinarians, and physicians are the most underrepresented tenants in the market: the highest stakes, the longest leases, and the least backup. That narrow focus is the whole strategy. As the saying goes: getting your focus as small as possible simplifies your thinking and crystallizes what you must do.
Tenant Representation
Tenant representation is the core of everything we do, and at Mirlo it means one thing without exceptions: we work for the tenant. Never the landlord, never both sides of the same building. The commission on every listing is funded by the landlord whether you’re represented or not — going alone doesn’t save the fee, it just means nobody at the table is working for you. In our transactions, the terms that move most between a landlord’s first offer and a signed lease are the tenant improvement allowance, the free-rent structure, and the renewal formula. We publish our current Southeast Michigan benchmarks for each — real numbers from real deals. One caution worth its own sentence: talk to us before you call the number on the sign. Once a listing broker claims the deal, adding your own advocate gets much harder.
Lease Negotiation & Renewals
The renewal is where landlords price in what they know: moving a practice is expensive, so tenants who negotiate without alternatives pay for staying. We start renewals twelve to eighteen months out and build real alternatives — priced, toured, credible — so your current landlord competes for you like a new tenant. Renewals we’ve run this way have reset above-market rents, produced new improvement dollars, converted lease structures, and added termination rights and renewal options the original lease never had.
Practice Startups
A scratch start touches everything at once — demographics, site selection, zoning, letter of intent, lease negotiation, build-out — and the sequencing is where startups get hurt. We quarterback the whole timeline: drawings, municipal permits, construction, and the free-rent structure that should be negotiated around that timeline, so you aren’t paying rent on a space that can’t see patients while insurance credentialing runs its course. Your job is the practice; ours is making sure the real estate opens when you do.
Relocations
A relocation done right solves what the current space can’t — size, visibility, parking, ownership — without losing the patients you’ve spent years earning. We manage both ends: negotiating the exit or holdover on your current lease, securing the next location, and sequencing the build-out so the practice never goes dark. And sometimes the best relocation is the one you don’t make: a credible plan to move is also the strongest leverage a renewal can have, and we’re equally happy when it lands you a better deal at your current address.
Expansions
Growth has its own real estate math. Adding operatories means confirming the building can actually carry them — plumbing, power, HVAC — before the lease amendment is signed. Taking the suite next door means negotiating expansion rights and build-out dollars, not just more square footage. A second location means demographics and site selection all over again, with the first practice’s referral patterns in the model. We’ve done all three, across every county we serve.
Buyer Representation & Building Purchases
When you buy your building, the seller has a broker working for them. We’re yours. From bank-branch conversions to purpose-built medical space, we manage the purchase end to end: market search and off-market outreach, valuation, offer structure, negotiation, inspections, and closing. The financing strategy comes with it — healthcare-specialty lenders offer qualified practice owners low- and even zero-down programs, and an SBA 504 structure with a 25-year amortization can bring ownership payments surprisingly close to rent. Most practice owners never hear that from a generalist broker.
Ground-up Development
When the right building doesn’t exist, we help you create it: land search and acquisition, zoning and municipal approvals, and coordination with the design-build team from site plan through delivery. Ground-up is the longest road and the most control you’ll ever have over your real estate — the practices that choose it get a building shaped around their clinical flow instead of a compromise shaped around someone else’s floor plan.
Why We Work As A Team
Nick and Remy’s thumbprints are on every Mirlo deal — and no client ever works with just Nick or just Remy. When you hire Mirlo, you get the firm’s full horsepower: every broker’s experience, every landlord relationship, and a network of attorneys, lenders, architects, and contractors who have done healthcare deals together for years. Every file is known by more than one person, so the answer to your question never waits on one calendar.
Nick Zagar is the CEO and Managing Director of Mirlo Real Estate Partners, an Ann Arbor-based commercial real estate firm representing healthcare tenants and buyers across Southeast Michigan — dentists, veterinarians, physicians, and other independent practice owners.
Since 2005, Nick has negotiated more than 1,100 commercial real estate transactions, representing both landlords and tenants. Before Mirlo, he was the Director of Oxford Commercial — the commercial brokerage arm of Oxford Companies in Ann Arbor — overseeing a 2.9 million square foot portfolio and doing hundreds of deals from the landlord’s side of the table. That history is a working advantage his clients feel in every negotiation: he knows how landlords build a lease, price a concession, and decide when to bend — because building those positions used to be his job. Since founding Mirlo, he has put that knowledge to work exclusively for healthcare practices — negotiating the leases, renewals, and building purchases where practice owners have the most at stake.
Nick believes an educated client is the best client. He’d rather teach you how your lease actually works than ask you to trust him — and the practice owners who work with him make better decisions because of it. He quarterbacks every transaction start to finish: site selection, lease and purchase negotiation, and build-out coordination, balancing the financial, operational, and clinical considerations that make healthcare real estate different from general office space.
Before real estate, Nick trained as a painter — a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. The art background shows up in the work. He sees the space, not just the lease: layout, patient flow, and how an office will actually function for a practice, before anyone signs anything.
Remy Isdaner
Vice President
313.969.3991 | remy@mirlorep.com
Remy Isdaner is a Vice President at Mirlo Real Estate Partners and a buyer/tenant-focused senior agent specializing in office, retail, and medical space. He provides tenant representation, lease analysis, market evaluation, site selection, and research services. With more than a decade of experience in commercial real estate, Remy is a trusted advisor and advocate for independent healthcare operators — including dental, veterinary, optometry, and medical practices — primarily in Michigan. He transacts throughout the state — Washtenaw, Oakland, Wayne, Macomb, Monroe, Jackson, Ingham, Genesee, St. Clair, and Lenawee counties — and his knowledge of the Metro Detroit market is unparalleled.
Remy came to Mirlo in 2021 after nearly four years at CARR Healthcare Realty, the national healthcare-only tenant representation firm, and a tenant-representation team at Colliers before that. He knows the national playbook from the inside — and he pairs it with working knowledge of Michigan’s landlords, townships, and submarkets, kept current deal by deal.
Startups are where Remy has built his reputation. A scratch-start practice touches everything at once — demographics and site selection, municipal zoning approvals, lease negotiation, and a build-out that has to work for clinical flow from day one. Remy quarterbacks all of it. Veterinary founders in particular seek him out: vet clinics carry zoning, soundproofing, and build-out complications that generalist agents rarely see coming.
Remy’s approach is rooted in building strong, lasting relationships with his clients. He takes the time to understand their unique needs and ensures they have the market data and insights to make the best real estate decisions — during the most expensive and important business decisions of their careers.
Lauren Niedermier
Director of Operations
After graduating college, Lauren was still undecided on which career path to take — but she knew she wanted a field where she could work with and help people. She didn’t necessarily choose real estate; real estate chose her. Lauren began her career at Oxford Commercial in Ann Arbor as the Brokerage Assistant, managing the behind-the-scenes responsibilities for a commercial brokerage department whose portfolio exceeded 2 million square feet. After three years at Oxford, she moved to residential leasing at Baker Street Properties in Ann Arbor, where as Director of Leasing for a portfolio of nearly 150 units she contributed to the company’s staggering growth over three years.
With her experience coordinating a commercial real estate department and helping grow a small business, Lauren is now the Director of Operations at Mirlo Real Estate Partners. She helps with everything from company goal setting and execution to database management to content creation and publication — if you’ve read a Mirlo case study or guide, Lauren’s hands were on it.
In the Community
Mirlo was recognized in 2024 as the largest corporate donor to the Michigan Dental Association Foundation — as reported in the Journal of the Michigan Dental Association — and continues to sponsor dental and veterinary organizations across Southeast Michigan, including district dental societies throughout the counties we serve. We show up where our clients are — because this is our market, and these are our people.
Talk to Us
If you’re weighing a lease, a renewal, a purchase, or a startup, give us 30 minutes. We’ll tell you honestly whether your situation fits our model — and if it doesn’t, we’ll point you somewhere that does.
What Our Clients Are Saying
Remy was very helpful and straight forward with me about the challenges of starting a practice. He kept me well informed and was very proactive, a professional in every aspect of the real estate business. I could not have navigated this process without him; I will definitely use Remy for our future growth needs.
Dr. Kevin Semma, OD
Remy has been an indispensable part of my journey to build a veterinary practice. I had another commercial realtor that was not familiar with veterinary profession when Remy reached out to me. When I decided to stay with my previous realtor, Remy was willing to answer any questions I had or help in any way, even though I was not signing with him. I felt he genuinely wanted my business to succeed and wanted to help. Soon I realized the importance of having a realtor who has special knowledge of the healthcare field when choosing a space and decided to reach out to him. Remy is very professional, relaxed, and inviting. He brings his own expertise as well as others to consult about different aspects of building a practice. Remy is available, thoughtful, supportive, and assists in problem solving concerns that arise. The process was less stressful, because he was a partner in the process, not just a realtor. I have and will continue to recommend him for any commercial real estate needs.
Dr. Katie Boatman, DVM
Working with Mirlo Real Estate Partners was a great experience, and I could not be more impressed with the level of service I received. From the very beginning, Nick and Remy helped me establish my preferences and outlined the best strategy for my specific situation. Not only werethey able to find the PERFECT space for me in a brand new medical office building, but due to the tight deadline, they were also able to find me an OUTSTANDING temporary space to occupy during the construction period to minimize downtime for my practice. Their hard work and dedication really made the transition seamless. Their knowledge of my needs and the market was STRONG and helped me achieve VERY FAVORABLE terms. I would highly recommend them to any healthcare provider for their commercial real estate needs.
Dr. Alon Kahana, MD, PhD
We are incredibly grateful to Remy Isdaner for guiding us through the challenging journey of starting our veterinary practice. Remy’s knowledge was deemed invaluable from the outset, assisting us in every aspect of the startup process. Remy found just the right building, and it wasn’t even on the market. He contacted the owners and successfully negotiated a favorable deal, making our dream of owning a practice a reality. Remy’s professionalism, persistence, and genuine care for our success truly set him apart. We highly recommend Remy to any business owner needing support with their business endeavors!
Dr. Krysten Andrews, DVM & Dr. TJ Vernaci, DVM
As an established oral surgeon, I can wholeheartedly recommend Remy Isdaner and Mirlo Real Estate Partners to any medical professional seeking to start or expand their practice. Not only did Remy advocate and fight for my best interest, but he also demonstrated an unparalleled understanding of my industry, exceeding my expectations and making the process as smooth as possible. With Remy taking so much off my plate I was able to focus on building and marketing my business, allowing me to open my doors with a full schedule of patients. I could not be more satisfied with my experience working with Remy and my new, state-of-the-art oral surgery practice.
Dr. Robert John, DDS, MD
I am thrilled to share my experience with Mirlo Real Estate Partners. As an oral surgeon, the thought of handling a commercial real estate transaction and the subsequent buildout of my new office was daunting. However, Mirlo made the entire process seamless and efficient. From the outset, they were attentive to every detail of my requirements. Their knowledge and professionalism were evident as they guided us through each step, ensuring that every aspect of the deal was executed at the highest level. Nick and Remy worked hard to advocate for us and were committed partners in our success. Thanks to their exceptional service, I am now operating in a state-of-the-art facility, perfectly suited for my patients and staff. I wholeheartedly recommend Mirlo Real Estate Partners to anyone looking for a reliable and highly competent commercial real estate partner.
Dr. Jeffrey Wasielewski, DDS, MD, MBA
