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Baby Boomers Are Driving the NNN Market

The baby boom generation is using single-tenant triple-net retail as a retirement plan, and it is generating huge activity in some unlikely markets.

Eric Carlton Eric Carlton

The market for single-tenant retail is seeing increasing investor demand. So much, in fact, that investors are being forced out of California to look for opportunities and yield. The driver of all of this demand? Baby boomers. The generation is retiring and cashing out of high-management properties, like office and apartment buildings, and into less management-intensive properties. Single-tenant, triple-net retail is the demographics’ favored asset class.

“The baby boom generation is big, and they are all retiring. The 60 year olds to 80 year olds are retiring, and they are cashing out of an office building or apartment building into what I call coupon clippers,” Eric Carlton, SVP at Colliers International, tells GlobeSt.com. “It is mailbox money. Our grandparents used to buy bonds, and they would get paid every month. That is what is happening here. There is a socio-economic pattern that is happening with money that is being placed into single-tenant retail because of the age of our population. It is a retirement plan.”

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Kelsi Maree Borland

Kelsi Maree Borland

Kelsi Maree Borland is a freelance journalist and magazine writer based in Los Angeles, California. For more than 5 years, she has extensively reported on the commercial real estate industry, covering major deals across all commercial asset classes, investment strategy and capital markets trends, market commentary, economic trends and new technologies disrupting and revolutionizing the industry. Her work appears daily on GlobeSt.com and regularly in Real Estate Forum Magazine. As a magazine writer, she covers lifestyle and travel trends. Her work has appeared in Angeleno, Los Angeles Magazine, Travel and Leisure and more.

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