In late 2024, Corbitt Kerr in our La Jolla, California office connected with the owner of a single-tenant Walmart net lease property in Ohio. The owner’s position was simple: he would sell if he reached his number. Stuart Frankel in our New York office went to work on the other side of the deal and brought in Agree Realty, one of the most active net lease REITs in the country. Agree submitted a letter of intent, and after several rounds of negotiation, with the seller coming down on price and the buyer coming up, both sides agreed on $7,600,000 at a 6.2% cap rate. Agree drafted the purchase and sale agreement and sent it over.

Where It Fell Apart

Then the conversation went quiet. A few days later, the owner told us he had changed his mind. He was not selling. The deal we had spent months building was dead, with no obvious way to bring it back.

How We Brought It Back

Rather than walking away, we kept both relationships warm for a full year. Corbitt stayed in regular contact with the owner, talking through the Walmart along with the other properties in his portfolio and steadily strengthening that relationship. On the buyer side, Stuart kept working with Agree Realty and closed several other net lease transactions with the REIT over the same period. Neither of us pushed. We both understood that a single-tenant net lease deal of this size rarely closes on the first attempt, and that staying close to the right people is what eventually creates the opening.

In December 2025, that patience paid off. The owner told Corbitt he was ready to sell, and we went straight back to Agree, who still wanted the asset. Before moving, we needed to confirm the motivation was real this time. The owner explained that he had found a property he wanted to acquire and needed to sell the Walmart to complete a 1031 exchange into it. That was the signal we had been waiting for.

How It Closed

Agree Realty submitted an offer of $7,600,000 in January 2026, holding the same value everyone had agreed to more than a year earlier, and the sale closed in under 60 days. The deal closed more than a full year after the first agreement, and it closed for one reason: we never let the relationships go cold.

The Silber Difference

We build and protect relationships on both sides of every transaction, which lets us close net lease deals over the course of years rather than chasing short-term wins. For owners of single-tenant net lease properties, and for the investors who buy them, that patience is often the difference between a deal that dies and a deal that gets done.

Handled by Corbitt Kerr (La Jolla, CA) and Stuart Frankel (New York), Silber National Net Lease Division.