Gas station buyers hold firm as war in Iran lifts fuel prices

Gas station and convenience-store buyers are showing little sign of stepping back from fuel-centric real estate even as pump prices climb on the supply shock from the war in Iran and oil executives warn that a fuel crisis has arrived, Bisnow reported. Money keeps chasing the sector anyway, its cap rates among the tightest in retail, while buyers lean on in-store revenue to underwrite the bet that nonfuel income holds up.

"Usually, it's quite calm. It's quite a boring industry," said Michal Mohelsky, founder and lead analyst at MMGC Invest, which runs feasibility studies for gas station investors. "Right now, everything is going through the roof."

The pricing supports him. Cap rates in the sector sit roughly 50 basis points above the 10-year Treasury yield, and top-credit leases trade at or below the Treasury yield, according to MMGC Invest data. Convenience store cap rates averaged 5.63% in the second quarter of 2026, the tightest of the 17 net lease sectors B&E tracks, against about 5.57% a year earlier. That six-basis-point widening year over year is its own kind of calm, while grocery and supermarket properties came in at 5.66% and pharmacy, discount store and early learning averaged above 7%.

Asset prices have moved far more than cap rates: closed sales averaged about $4.6 million, or roughly $1,400 per square foot, according to an August Northmarq report. Sai Thakor, a CBRE vice president who has covered Houston for seven years, told Bisnow that sites selling for $1.5 million to $2 million when he started now trade between $4 million and $5 million.

The reason sits inside the store, in nonfuel revenue: a higher pump price does not create margin unless an operator has large underground tanks it filled when fuel was cheaper, Thakor said. Large operators instead lean on nonfuel revenue already in place, whether a differentiated food and beverage program or a McDonald's or Starbucks on site. The spread between winners and also-rans is wide: the top decile of U.S. convenience store operators by operating profit generated more than seven times the food service sales of the bottom decile in 2025, according to an industry report cited in the coverage.

As this publication has argued, the retail scarcity premium belongs to net-lease and grocery, with pricing set by anchor lease duration rather than headline cap rates. The c-store figures cut against half of that: fuel-centric real estate is now priced inside grocery, which suggests the underwriting is being run off the store's food-service margin rather than fuel volume. One quarter and one data set is thin ground for a repricing story, and the sector's own numbers describe a market that has drifted a few basis points. Whether 5.63% holds when the next quarterly reading lands is the number to watch, and the price of a tank of gas appears to have very little to do with it.