Besides the AmeriStop transaction, the company closed earlier this year on $24 million in financing on a sale-leaseback deal that put Pantry Inc. in 23 stores formerly owned and operated by R.R. Morrison & Son Inc. in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Then the company closed on a $35.1 million sale-leaseback and debt-financing deal with Boca Raton, FL-based USA Grocers Group Inc. to acquire 32 stores in the Atlanta area that operate under the Exxon brand.

Formed in 1998, Petroleum Realty emerged on the market with access to an original round of $300 million in capital financing through the partnership with New York-based Lehman Brothers.

Despite the current slowdown in acquisitions, company officials remain confident they'll reach a goal of financing at least $250 million in assets by the end of the year.

Much of the company's confidence banks on the expectation that larger U.S. petroleum industry retailers eventually will return to more active merger-acquisition strategy that characterized the market over the past three or four years.

Those companies subsequently divested numerous properties to ameliorate federal regulatory fears over possible monopolistic or oligopolistic activity.

"These acquisitions have been reduced somewhat as the expansion mode of these marketers have slowed significantly," Glimcher says. "That aggressive financing also is now gone. It's been replaced by a more conservative underwriting process, which is what we do at Petroleum Realty."

That market dynamic impacted Petroleum Realty because it created a smaller market of qualified companies.

"It's impacting us from the standpoint that the type of companies we're looking to finance are very liquid with a strong base of equity," Glimcher says. "This group of companies we can choose from is a smaller group. But we expect an upturn to occur in the later part of the year."