Single-Tenant Triple Net Lease: Credit, Cap Rate Decomposition, and the 2026 Net Lease Bid

Key Takeaways

What Single-Tenant Triple Net Lease Actually Means

A single-tenant triple net lease — abbreviated STNL or NNN in industry shorthand — is a commercial real estate contract in which one tenant occupies the entirety of a property and bears the three categories of operating expense that the "net" qualifiers count: real estate taxes, property insurance, and CAM / maintenance. The landlord receives the contract rent net of those obligations, which is what makes the structure attractive: in the cleanest forms the landlord's only role is to hold title, collect rent, and deliver the reversion at lease expiry.

The structure occupies a specific institutional niche. STNL retail (drug stores, dollar stores, QSR pads, auto-service, big-box single-tenants) is the dominant single-tenant net-lease category by transaction count, with $30–50B of annual U.S. transaction volume across institutional and 1031-private capital buyers. The publicly traded net-lease REITs — Realty Income (O), Agree Realty (ADC), NETSTREIT (NTST), Spirit Realty (SPRT), EPR Properties (EPR), Four Corners Property Trust (FCPT), Broadstone Net Lease (BNL), Essential Properties Realty Trust (EPRT) — aggregate over $80B of single-tenant retail and industrial NNN assets. Realty Income alone closed $6.2B of investments in 2025 at a 7.3% blended initial cash yield per its public disclosures.

The institutional underwriting question is never "is this a triple net lease?" — the form is well understood. The question is what cap rate to assign, and that question collapses to credit. A 1.0-acre site with a drive-thru building leased to McDonald's USA, LLC trades at a fundamentally different cap rate than the same physical asset leased to a regional franchisee operating LLC, even if both leases are nominally "triple net" with 20-year primary terms and 10% bumps every 5 years. The cap-rate decomposition framework below isolates what the buyer is paying for at each layer of the stack.

The 2026 Single-Tenant Net Lease Bid

Boulder Group's Q1 2026 Net Lease Research Report — the canonical quarterly print for STNL pricing, published in March 2026 — sets the overall single-tenant cap rate at 6.80%, down one basis point QoQ from 6.81% in Q4 2025. The headline is "almost boring" stability, as InvestmentGrade.com's Q1 2026 commentary notes — but the subsector and brand-level data tell a much more interesting story. The headline conceals a market that is filtered, not frozen.

Subsector breakdown from the Q1 2026 print:

Boulder Group Q1 2026 Net Lease Research Report. The retail subsector is the tightest bid; office carries the widest spread. 10Y UST benchmark 4.38% on the print date.

The retail bid is materially tighter than office or industrial because the institutional pool — net- lease REITs plus 1031 capital plus family offices — concentrates almost entirely on retail single- tenant paper. The buyer mix is what compresses the spread; the asset characteristics (long-dated lease, fixed escalations, IG or near-IG credit) are largely fungible across sectors at the property-form level.

The brand-level stack is where the institutional reading lives. Within the 6.55% retail blended number sits a 370+ bps range of brand-specific prints:

Three observations from the brand stack. First, the McDonald's GL at 4.40% trades inside the 10-Year Treasury at 4.38%. This is not a bond-pricing anomaly; it reflects three things buyers are paying for that the Treasury doesn't offer: the fee-simple reversion at end of term, embedded rent growth (fixed bumps or CPI escalations), and 1031 demand from private-capital buyers competing with the institutional bid for the same paper. The negative nominal spread is the market's signal that those features together exceed the absolute curve level.

Second, the Walgreens print at 8.10% is the cycle's signature credit-event repricing. The S&P BBB− rating sits one notch above speculative grade; the company's announced store-closure program and pharmacy- benefit-manager headwinds drove the cap rate from a 6.25–6.50% range in 2022 to the current 8.10% over roughly 36 months — 160–185 bps of repricing on idiosyncratic credit deterioration without the physical assets changing at all. This is what cap-rate decomposition is for: the lease form is unchanged, the building is unchanged, but the credit spread has moved 160+ bps.

Third, the CVS print at 6.80% sits at the STNL overall median — effectively the bellwether of the IG drug retail tier. CVS retains S&P BBB and a parent guarantee on the lease obligation; the 240 bps gap to Walgreens at 8.10% with the same physical product (free-standing drug-store with drive-thru) is the institutional pricing of one notch of credit deterioration plus a more aggressive store-closure overhang.

Cap Rate Decomposition: The 5-Component Build

The institutional cap rate is not a market quote — it's a build. The broker SERP defines NNN cap rates by quoting the latest Boulder Group print and stopping there. The institutional buyer decomposes the print into five components, sizes each component to the specific lease in hand, and uses the build as the test of whether the market quote is the right price for the specific paper. The five components:

1. Risk-free rate. The 10-Year U.S. Treasury yield is the institutional anchor — at 4.38% on the Q1 2026 print date per the Federal Reserve H.15 release. Some practitioners use the 5-year or 7-year UST instead, depending on the lease's primary term remaining; the duration-matched UST is the theoretically correct benchmark but the 10-year is the institutional convention because most STNL leases have 10-25 years of remaining primary plus options, and the 10-year is the most liquid benchmark.

2. Credit spread. The compensation for tenant default risk on the rent obligation. For an investment-grade tenant, this is approximately the corporate-bond OAS for the same rating and duration: BBB industrial-rated OAS sits around 100–120 bps Q1 2026 per ICE BofA index data, so a BBB-rated tenant on a 15-year lease earns a credit spread in roughly that range, adjusted upward 50–100 bps for the operating- asset nature of the rent obligation (vs the unsecured corporate bond). Per InvestmentGrade.com's IG 180 NNN Tenant Index methodology, NNN cap rates for the same parent typically run ~150–200 bps wide of the parent's corporate bond yield — that ~185 bps NNN-vs-corporate-bond spread is the institutional bond- proxy framing and is also the headline math behind the "STNL as quasi-fixed-income substitute" thesis.

For sub-IG and unrated tenants the credit spread expands by 100–200 bps per notch downgrade. A BB+ tenant (say, Bed Bath beyond rescue) carries a ~250–325 bps credit spread; a B-rated or unrated franchisee operating LLC carries 350–500 bps. The credit spread is the largest swing factor in the build; it explains almost all of the 370 bps wedge between McDonald's GL at 4.40% and Walgreens at 8.10%.

3. Illiquidity premium. CRE is not a corporate bond — you can't sell a $5M STNL property at 11:30am the way you can sell a McDonald's Corp 2034 bond. The illiquidity premium compensates the buyer for this. For institutional-grade STNL with brand-tenant credit, this typically runs 50–100 bps. For specialized or non-fungible single-tenant assets (a build-to-suit for a niche industrial user, an auto-service prototype that doesn't re-tenant easily), the illiquidity premium can be 150–250 bps. The 1031-eligible, easily fungible drug-store box on a corner sits at the low end of the range; the one-off industrial sale-leaseback to a sub-IG operator sits at the high end.

4. Reversion / WALT uncertainty. The compensation for terminal-value risk at lease expiry — whether the building re-tenants, what the going market rent will be, what re-leasing capex looks like. For a 20+ year WALT corporate ground lease where improvements revert to the fee owner, the reversion is heavily discounted in PV terms and the premium is modest (25–50 bps). For a 5–10 year remaining primary term with significant re-tenanting risk, the premium expands to 75–125 bps. Boulder Group's Q1 2026 reporting shows institutional-grade STNL clearing at a 19-year weighted average lease term — institutional buyers concentrate on the long-WALT segment specifically because it minimizes this component.

5. Sponsor / asset-specific premium. The catch-all for lease-specific or asset-specific risk factors that don't fit the prior four. Examples: a secondary-market location (+20–50 bps), a sub-IG corporate parent on what is nominally a "national tenant" lease (+30–75 bps), a non-standard escalation structure that adds modeling friction (+10–25 bps), a complex REA on a former pad-site carve-out (+15–40 bps). On clean, standard-form institutional paper this component approaches zero; on idiosyncratic single-asset deals it can dominate.

The worked example in the figure above sums to 6.73% — 4.38% + 1.85% + 0.75% + 0.45% + 0.30% — which sits 7 bps inside Boulder Group's CVS Q1 2026 print of 6.80%. Close enough to call the print fair for IG drug retail with the assumed lease profile. The institutional practitioner's interrogation begins when the build differs from the market by 25+ bps: that's where lease-specific features, supply / demand imbalances, or credit-event repricing are driving the gap.

Tenant Credit: From S&P BBB to Franchisee Guarantor

Tenant credit is the largest component of the STNL cap-rate decomposition and the part where institutional discipline pays off most. The institutional ladder spans four tiers, each with its own cap-rate band and its own structural risk profile:

Tier 1 — High investment grade (S&P AA / A). The narrowest cap-rate band in the universe. Walmart (AA), Costco (A+), Home Depot (A), Target (A), 7-Eleven (A through corporate parent Seven & i). These tenants represent the institutional core: long-dated leases, fixed escalations, IG-rated parent guarantor on the rent obligation, fungible physical assets in primary and secondary markets. Cap- rate band Q1 2026: 5.25–6.00%, credit spread 80–150 bps over UST. The 1031 demand pool concentrates here because the credit clears the IG threshold required by many DST sponsors and lenders.

Tier 2 — Standard investment grade (S&P BBB+ / BBB / BBB−). The widest band in the universe by brand range. McDonald's (BBB+) at 4.40% sits at the floor of the tier on ground-lease structure and 20+ year WALT; Walgreens (BBB−) at 8.10% sits at the top of the tier on store-closure overhang and downgrade-watch pressure. CVS (BBB) at 6.80% is the median. The band's width is the cycle's structural feature: brand-specific credit events have repriced individual issuers without changing the rating cohort meaningfully. The institutional reading is that the rating is a starting point, not a conclusion — the buyer underwrites the specific tenant's free cash flow, store-level performance, and forward credit trajectory.

Tier 3 — Near-IG / speculative (S&P BB+ / BB / B). Chipotle (BB+, on path to IG per most analyst tracks), Wendy's (B+), Family Dollar (BB− after the announced Dollar Tree spin-off), Big Lots (CCC pre-bankruptcy 2024). Cap-rate band 7.50–9.50%, credit spread 300–500 bps. The institutional buyer pool thins materially in this tier — most net-lease REITs cap sub-IG exposure at 15–25% of portfolio — and the remaining bid is concentrated in higher-yield private capital and REPE strategies underwriting to operator-level credit. Repricing risk on bankruptcy or guidance-cut events is concentrated; the portfolio-level exposure deserves explicit underwriting.

Tier 4 — Unrated franchisee operating LLC. The franchisee-guaranteed paper where the rent obligor is the operating LLC ("Mid-Atlantic McDonald's Holdings, LLC", "Sunshine Wendy's Operators, LLC") rather than the franchisor parent. Boulder Group's Q1 2026 data prints corporate-guaranteed QSR at 5.82% and franchisee-guaranteed QSR at 6.80% — a 98 bps headline spread that compresses to 72–90 bps controlled for term and location. The franchisee paper is not "the same building with a cheaper guarantor." It's a distinct security: the rent runs through an operating LLC whose creditworthiness depends on store- level cash flow, the franchisor typically does not guarantee the franchisee's rent obligation, and defaults cluster regionally (correlated within a single franchisee operator across all that operator's stores).

The practitioner rule on the credit ladder: each ratings notch typically adds 100–200 bps to the cap rate, with structural step-changes at the IG threshold (BBB− to BB+ is more than one notch in cap-rate impact because many institutional buyer mandates cut at IG) and at the franchisee boundary (corporate guarantee to operating LLC is a structural change, not just a credit step). The Family Dollar case study illustrates the structural-change premium: when Dollar Tree removed the parent guarantee from Family Dollar leases in July 2025 per InvestmentGrade.com reporting, the cap rate on Family Dollar STNL paper jumped materially — not because the underlying real estate changed but because the rent obligor became the operating subsidiary alone.

Indicative cap-rate bands by S&P notch, Q1 2026 institutional STNL retail. Bands overlap because cap rates are also driven by WALT, escalations, asset specificity, and the supply / demand dynamics of the specific brand cohort. Read the tenant's actual rating and recent bond-market signals, not just the broad rating bucket.

Lease Structure: NN vs NNN vs Absolute Net vs Ground Lease

"Triple net" is a contract term with a specific definition — the tenant pays real estate taxes, property insurance, and CAM (common area maintenance) — not a synonym for "passive landlord." The institutional vocabulary has five forms, each shifting expense responsibility incrementally toward the tenant. Getting this vocabulary right matters because the cap rate and the landlord workload differ materially across forms.

Lease-form responsibility matrix. The cap-rate impacts are indicative for the same tenant credit; tighter cap rates as you move down the matrix reflect declining landlord operating exposure and cleaner cash flow. Absolute net and ground lease are the institutional gold standard because the landlord has effectively no operating responsibilities once the lease is executed.

Triple net (NNN) is the institutional benchmark form. The tenant pays the three categories of operating expense — taxes, insurance, CAM — on a pass-through basis, typically billed quarterly or annually with year-end reconciliation. The landlord retains responsibility for the roof and structural components ("the roof, walls, and foundation" is the standard institutional phrasing) and some capital expenditures. Most STNL deals quoted in the Boulder Group report are NNN.

Double net (NN) shifts taxes and insurance to the tenant but keeps CAM, roof, structure, and capex with the landlord. NN structures are most common on free-standing single-tenant industrial and some office; they're rarer in retail. The 50–100 bps cap-rate haircut vs NNN reflects the landlord's incremental CAM exposure (parking lot, lighting, snow removal, landscaping on a single-tenant retail box).

Absolute net (sometimes called "bondable") goes further than NNN — the tenant takes on roof, structure, and all capital expenditures, leaving the landlord with no operating responsibilities whatsoever. This is the "set-and-forget" institutional form and is the structure most preferred by 1031 exchange buyers and DST sponsors. Cap rates run 25–50 bps inside comparable NNN for the same tenant credit. The absolute net structure is common on long-dated drug-store and dollar-store leases (Walgreens, CVS, Dollar General have historically signed absolute net) and on credit tenant lease (CTL) financings where the lender requires zero landlord operating exposure.

Ground lease (GL) is the cleanest institutional form. The tenant constructs and owns the building; the landlord owns the land and recovers it at lease expiry (with improvements reverting per the lease terms, typically to the fee owner). Cap rates run 75–200 bps inside comparable NNN because the landlord has zero physical exposure to the building — if the operator defaults the landlord recovers the dirt and re-tenants the site. McDonald's corporate ground leases at 4.40% Q1 2026 are the canonical institutional ground-lease print. See our companion article on pad sites, outparcels, and QSR ground-lease credit for the full ground-lease mechanics.

The vocabulary trap: practitioners frequently use "triple net" loosely to mean "tenant pays everything" when the actual lease is absolute net, ground lease, or somewhere in between. Read the operating expense section of the lease before relying on the cap-rate benchmark. The diligence question is not "is this triple net?" but "exactly which expenses pass through to the tenant, and what's the landlord's residual operating exposure?"

1031 and the Net-Lease Bid

The single most important institutional dynamic in STNL pricing is the 1031 exchange demand pool. Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code allows real estate owners to defer capital gains tax by reinvesting sale proceeds into like-kind property within strict timelines: 45 days to identify the replacement, 180 days to close. The combination of the deadline pressure and the like-kind requirement makes single-tenant net lease the dominant 1031 replacement product available.

The 1031 buyer needs three things from a replacement property: ability to identify and close within the statutory windows, simple operating profile (the 1031 buyer is typically not building out a property- management team), and sufficient transaction-friction-tolerance to absorb broker fees and acquisition costs inside the tax benefit. STNL retail is uniquely suited to all three. Identifying a McDonald's GL or a CVS NNN at the brokered cap rate is a one-call exercise; due diligence on a single-tenant credit lease is materially faster than on a multi-tenant retail center; and the tax deferral (typically 20–25% of the sale proceeds on the original property) more than absorbs any incremental cap-rate premium paid for the replacement.

The institutional implication: the 1031 buyer's reservation price is often inside the institutional REIT's reservation price because the alternative is taxable boot. A 1031 buyer rolling $5M of gain on an apartment sale into a McDonald's GL is comparing the after-tax yield of the McDonald's GL against the after-tax yield of a fully-taxed alternative (the original gain creates ~$1.0–1.2M of federal + state tax liability). The 1031-deferred yield is computed on the full $5M of proceeds; the alternative yield is computed on $3.8–4.0M of after-tax proceeds. The math heavily favors paying a tighter cap rate to preserve the deferral.

This dynamic creates the cycle's structural floor. When institutional deal flow slows — cap-rate widening in the broader CRE market, REIT mandate shifts, or financing dislocations — the 1031 bid keeps the floor under the prints because the 1031 buyer's alternative is the taxable event, not waiting for cap rates to widen. The McDonald's GL at 4.40% trading inside the 10-Year Treasury is partly a 1031- bid phenomenon: the institutional REITs would arguably price higher, but the 1031 pool is willing to pay the premium to defer the tax. This is why the broker SERP often misreads the cap rate as a "bond-pricing anomaly" — it's not; it's a tax-arbitrage-driven bid that doesn't show up in a pure financial-yield framework.

Underwriting implication: when modeling forward cap-rate sensitivities, distinguish institutional-only scenarios from 1031-supported scenarios. In a heavy 1031 supply year (typically following a strong apartment or office sale year as that capital seeks tax-deferred placement), STNL cap rates can compress 25–50 bps below pure-institutional fundamentals would suggest. In a thin 1031 year, the institutional REITs become the dominant marginal buyer and cap rates revert to the credit-spread-driven build.

How to Model It

The institutional STNL underwriting workflow has five computational pieces that belong in distinct tabs of any pro forma. They're not difficult individually; the discipline is in keeping each piece honest and re-cross-checking against the broader cap-rate decomposition build.

Tab 1 — Lease abstract and obligor identification. Capture the exact rent obligor (legal entity name from the lease cover page), the parent guarantor if any, the parent's current S&P and Moody's ratings, the lease form (NN / NNN / absolute net / GL — from the operating expense section, not the marketing materials), the primary term remaining, the extension option count and length, and the full escalation schedule. The most common modeling error: importing a "McDonald's" rent line without verifying that the obligor is McDonald's USA, LLC vs a regional franchisee operating LLC. The cap- rate decomposition is materially different.

Tab 2 — Cap rate decomposition build. Build the 5-component cap-rate stack as a formula. Risk-free rate (linked to live UST source — Federal Reserve H.15 daily release). Credit spread (lookup table indexed by S&P rating + lease term remaining bucket, populated from corporate bond OAS data and the InvestmentGrade.com NNN-vs-corporate-bond spread). Illiquidity premium (single input, defaulted to 75 bps for fungible IG retail). Reversion / WALT premium (formula based on years remaining vs a 20-year benchmark). Sponsor / asset-specific premium (manual input with annotated justification). The built cap rate is the test against the market quote.

Tab 3 — Market quote validation. Pull the most recent Boulder Group quarterly print for the brand or subsector and compare to the built cap rate. A tolerance of 25 bps in either direction suggests the market quote is fair for the credit-and-term profile; a 25+ bps gap demands an explanation rooted in lease-specific features (term remaining, escalation deviation, asset specificity), recent credit events, or supply-and-demand dynamics (heavy 1031 supply year, recent brand-specific downgrade).

Tab 4 — Cash flow schedule and yield-to-maturity. Project annual contract rent with contractual escalations through primary term and expected option periods. Compute the in-place cap rate (Year 1 rent / purchase price) and the yield to expiry (IRR of the contracted cash flows assuming reversion at lease end). The cap rate is the institutional headline; the yield to expiry incorporates the escalation schedule and is the institutionally correct comparison against duration-matched corporate bonds. The institutional bond-proxy framing depends on this calculation.

Tab 5 — Sensitivity and credit-event scenarios. Build sensitivities for (a) cap-rate compression / decompression on resale, (b) credit downgrade scenarios that re-price the asset (the Family Dollar +15 bps case study, the Walgreens 160-185 bps repricing case study), and (c) lease-renewal vs re-tenanting at expiry. The credit-event sensitivity is where institutional discipline pays off — the buyer who modeled the Walgreens downgrade scenario in 2022 with a 6.50% base case and a 7.50% downside avoided buying paper that subsequently repriced to 8.10%. The buyer who treated the cap rate as a static market quote ate the repricing.

Build It in Apers

Common Mistakes in Single-Tenant Net Lease Underwriting

• Treating the cap rate as a market quote rather than a build. The institutional practitioner decomposes the cap rate into its five components and tests the market quote against the build. The broker treats the cap rate as exogenous — "Boulder Group says 6.80%, so 6.80% it is." The discipline matters most at the credit-event boundaries: the Walgreens repricing from 6.50% to 8.10% over 36 months is invisible to a "market quote" approach and obvious to a credit-spread-driven decomposition.

• Confusing investment-grade tenant with investment-grade lease. An "investment-grade tenant" means the parent entity (Walmart Inc., Costco Wholesale Corporation, CVS Health Corporation) is rated S&P BBB− or above by at least one of the major agencies. An "investment-grade lease" requires that parent to be the obligor on the rent obligation, not a subsidiary or franchisee operating LLC. Many "national tenant" leases are signed by sub-IG or unrated subsidiaries with no parent guarantee. Read the rent obligor entity and the guarantee structure before applying the IG cap rate.

• Using the wrong duration on the risk-free rate. The 10-Year UST is the institutional convention but the duration-matched benchmark is the theoretically correct anchor. A 5-year remaining primary term lease is better benchmarked against the 5-Year UST (typically 50–100 bps inside the 10-year). For long-dated ground leases with 40+ year contractual terms, the 30-Year UST is closer to right. Using the 10-Year on a short-paper lease overstates the risk-free anchor by 50–100 bps and understates the credit spread by the same amount.

• Treating absolute net and triple net as interchangeable. Absolute net adds roof, structure, and capex to the tenant's responsibilities; triple net keeps roof and structure with the landlord. The cap-rate differential is 25–50 bps for the same credit. On a $5M lease, that's $125K–$250K of value mispriced. Read the operating expense section of the lease — not the marketing summary — before benchmarking.

• Ignoring the 1031 supply dynamic in forward sensitivity. STNL cap-rate compression in a given quarter is often a 1031-supply phenomenon, not a fundamentals-driven institutional revaluation. Modeling a forward 25-bps compression as "the market shifting" when it's actually "heavy 1031 supply chasing limited STNL inventory" produces wrong exit assumptions. Distinguish institutional-only and 1031-supported scenarios in sensitivity tables.

• Underpricing the credit-event scenario. The Walgreens repricing from 6.50% to 8.10% over 2022–2026 is a 26%+ loss of asset value with no change to the lease form or the physical building. The institutional discipline is to model 100-bps credit-spread downside scenarios explicitly, not as tail events but as base sensitivities. Family Dollar's July 2025 parent-guarantee removal was a one-day +15 bps credit-event move; Walgreens' has been a 36-month grind. Both deserve explicit scenario tables.

• Failing to read the escalation schedule before benchmarking. A 0% / flat-rent lease with 15 years remaining is worth materially less than a 10%-every-5-years lease with the same WALT and same tenant. The institutional convention is to bench the cap rate against fixed-bump leases; flat- rent paper deserves a 20–30 bps wider cap rate to compensate for the absence of inflation hedge. Many older 1980s-vintage NNN leases have flat rent through year 20+ — identify those before applying the bumped-lease cap rate.

FAQ

Related Articles

• Pad Sites & Outparcels: Ground Lease Economics, QSR Credit, and the 2026 Cap Rate Stack — the ground-lease companion that walks the McDonald's GL 4.40% / Chick-fil-A 4.50% / corporate-vs-franchisee QSR spread mechanics.
• Retail Underwriting: Anchor Economics and Co-Tenancy Provisions — the multi-tenant retail framework that contextualizes single-tenant credit underwriting within anchored shopping center structure.
• Grocery-Anchored Retail: Below-Market Anchor Rent and Inline Economics — the grocery-anchored center underwriting where below-market anchor leases interact with inline cap-rate stacking.
• Dark Stores and Big-Box Vacancy: Retenanting Economics — the credit-event-driven scenario adjacent to STNL credit deterioration (Walgreens, Big Lots, Rite Aid).
• Cap Rate Calculator and Formula — the underlying valuation primitive (NOI ÷ value) driving every STNL pricing decision.

Sources

• Boulder Group, Q1 2026 Net Lease Research Report — the canonical Q1 2026 STNL print: 6.80% overall (−1 bps QoQ), retail 6.55%, industrial 7.15%, office 7.90%; McDonald's GL 4.40%, Chick-fil-A 4.50%, corporate QSR 5.82%, franchisee QSR 6.80%, CVS 6.80%, Dollar General 7.15%, Walgreens 8.10%; 19-year institutional WALT.
• InvestmentGrade.com, "Investment Grade Net Lease Cap Rates Q1 2026" — the institutional commentary on the Boulder Group print: the "filtered, not frozen" thesis, the brand-level repricing on credit events (Walgreens, Family Dollar), and the IG 180 NNN Tenant Index methodology for cap-rate-vs-corporate-bond spread.
• InvestmentGrade.com, "NNN Cap Rates 2026" — the brand-by-brand Q1 2026 NNN cap rate database, including the term-remaining bucketing (Walgreens 15-19 yr at 6.75% vs <5 yr at 9.25%) that drives the WALT premium calculation.
• NNN REIT Inc. Q1 2026 Form 10-Q via SEC EDGAR — institutional benchmark: 19-year weighted average lease term, $0.50 EPS, $0.87 AFFO per share, investments closed at 7.5% initial cash cap rate. Cite by name.
• Realty Income Corporation 2025 Form 10-K and Q1 2026 guidance via SEC EDGAR — institutional benchmark: 98.9% portfolio occupancy, $6.2B 2025 investment volume at 7.3% blended initial cash yield, 2026 AFFO guidance $4.41-$4.44 (+3.0-3.7%). Cite by name.
• ICE BofA US Corporate BBB Option-Adjusted Spread Index via FRED — institutional benchmark for BBB credit spread vs UST (~100-120 bps Q1 2026); the input to the credit-spread component of the STNL cap-rate decomposition.
• U.S. Treasury yield curve via Federal Reserve H.15 release — 10-Year UST 4.38% on Q1 2026 print date; the risk-free anchor of the cap-rate decomposition.
• Marcus & Millichap, "Research Brief: Single-Tenant Net Lease, November 2025" — brokerage research framing of late-2025 STNL transaction dynamics. Cite by name.
• Matthews Real Estate Investment Services, "What the QSR Cap Rate Plateau Is Really Signaling" — brokerage insights on the institutional-vs-secondary bifurcation thesis applicable to STNL retail. Cite by name.
• Internal Revenue Code Section 1031 and Treasury Regulations — the statutory framework for like-kind exchanges (45-day identification, 180-day close); the source of the 1031 demand-floor dynamic in STNL pricing.