Chris Volk, president and CEO of STORE Capital Corp. (NYSE: STOR), joined REIT.com for a CEO Spotlight video interview during REITWeek 2015: NAREIT’s Investor Forum, held in New York.
STORE is an acronym for single-tenant operational real estate, which is the company’s target market. STORE’s tenants operate across a variety of industries within the service, retail and industrial sectors. Restaurants, health clubs, early childhood education centers, movie theaters and furniture stores represent the top industries in its portfolio.
Volk said the company remains on target to achieve $1 billion in acquisitions in 2015, having already booked more than $500 million of new investments through mid-May. STORE Capital invested $1.1 billion in 2014.
“The fundamentals are terrific,” Volk said. He emphasized that STORE acts as a financing partner to middle market and larger customers. “The need we can fill not only helps them lower their cost of capital, but also gives them a more breathable and flexible balance sheet, which in today’s market is hugely valuable,” Volk said.
As for tenant and geographic diversity, Volk stressed that STORE is in touch with more than 9,000 different companies across the U.S. “As we are able to create relationships with those companies, then by nature we become pretty widely diversified,” he said. With the exception of Texas, no state accounts for more than 10 percent of STORE’s portfolio.