Dollar Stores: What a Lost Guarantee Costs

By ANL Research · August 2026

The credit event

In July 2025, Dollar Tree completed the sale of Family Dollar to Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management for roughly $1.0 billion. The tenant did not change. The credit behind it did.

Family Dollar is now privately held with no public credit rating, and new leases no longer carry a Dollar Tree corporate guarantee. Roughly a thousand stores have closed or are slated for closure. For a net lease investor, that is the whole ball game: the rent cheque is the same size, but the balance sheet standing behind it is not, and the residual risk on a box built for a specific operator has gone up.

Dollar General moved in the opposite direction over the same period. It reported first-quarter fiscal 2026 net sales of $10.8 billion, up 3.4% with same-store sales up 2.0%, and plans roughly 450 new U.S. store openings in fiscal 2026 — which continues to feed the new-construction net lease pipeline this sector depends on.

The pricing follows the credit exactly. Our Dollar General listings ask 6.52%. Our Family Dollar listings ask 8.83%. That 231 basis point gap is the market repricing a guarantee that went away — and it is corroborated at national scale, where the same two tenants ask 7.15% and 8.75%.

Tenant by tenant

Tenant	Listings	Average ask	Median	Avg term	Avg price
Dollar General	47	6.52%	6.50%	12.0 yrs	$2.08M
DG Market	2	6.48%	6.48%	14.8 yrs	$2.16M
Dollar Tree	8	6.90%	7.08%	7.9 yrs	$2.42M
Family Dollar	2	8.83%	8.83%	4.3 yrs	$1.27M

Term is stated on 42 of these 59 listings. The two Family Dollar listings are too few to constitute a benchmark on their own — see below.

Dollar General is the sector here in every practical sense: 47 of 59 listings, spread across 18 states, at an average asking price of $2.08 million. It is the most consistently priced tenant on the shelf, and the one an exchange buyer is most likely to be shown.

Against the national benchmark

The Boulder Group’s Q2 2026 net lease report puts the dollar store sector at 7.49% asking, with Dollar General at 7.15%, Dollar Tree at 7.55%, and Family Dollar at 8.75%. Their figures and ours both measure asking cap rates, so the comparison is like for like.

Tenant	ANL live book	National benchmark	Difference
Dollar General (47)	6.52%	7.15%	63 bps inside
Dollar Tree (8)	6.90%	7.55%	65 bps inside
Family Dollar (2)	8.83%	8.75%	8 bps wide

Two listings is an anecdote, not a benchmark, and we will not pretend otherwise. What makes the Family Dollar row worth printing anyway is that it lands within 8 basis points of a national figure built from a far larger sample. Our two deals are not telling you where Family Dollar prices; the national number is. Ours are telling you that our book is not an outlier.

Why the sector average is the wrong number

The dollar store sector average in our book is 6.65%. Against the national 7.49% that looks like an 84 basis point discount, and the convenient explanation is tenant mix — our book is 80% Dollar General while the national figure carries far more Family Dollar at 8.75%.

Convenient, but mostly wrong. Repricing our own mix at the national per-tenant benchmarks gives 7.26%. That splits the 84 basis point gap 23 basis points to mix and 61 to pricing. Roughly three-quarters of it is a genuine price difference, which is the same story the per-tenant rows above already tell.

Use the tenant number, never the sector number. A “dollar store at a 6.65” describes nothing you can buy. The two ends of this sector are 231 basis points apart and are backed by entirely different balance sheets.

Term is doing work here too

The term profile tracks the credit almost exactly, which is what you would expect when a tenant stops signing long new leases. Dollar General averages 12.0 years of remaining term and DG Market 14.8. Dollar Tree averages 7.9. Family Dollar averages 4.3.

Some of the 231 basis point gap is therefore duration rather than credit — but the two are not independent here. A tenant that has closed a thousand stores is a tenant whose remaining leases run short, and the market is pricing both facts at once.

What we would underwrite differently

One. Read the guarantee, not the sign. A Family Dollar lease signed before July 2025 may carry a Dollar Tree corporate guarantee; one signed after does not. Two identical-looking buildings can sit either side of that line, and nothing on the storefront tells you which. This is the first document to pull.

Two. Treat 8%+ dollar store yield as a closure question. With roughly a thousand Family Dollar stores closed or slated for closure, the relevant analysis is not the cap rate but whether this specific store survives the rationalisation — sales per square foot, distance to the nearest surviving unit, and the rent against local market rent for a comparable box.

Three. On Dollar General, underwrite the box, not the credit. The credit is not the risk at 6.52%. The risk is a single-purpose building averaging 9,932 square feet, often in a small market, and what it re-lets for if the tenant does not renew. Our Dollar General listings average $2.08 million — about $210 a foot. Ask what that box is worth to the second-best tenant in town.

Methodology and sources

Pricing is built from the live inventory in the American Net Lease database as of August 15, 2026: 59 active dollar store listings, every one carrying an asking cap rate stated by the listing broker. Duplicate and withdrawn listings are excluded. No cap rate here is derived, imputed, or estimated by us. Remaining term is stated on 42 of the 59.

These are asking cap rates, not closed transactions. We are reporting what sellers are asking, not what buyers paid. We hold no verified closed-transaction dataset today, and nothing here should be read as a transaction comp. National comparisons are asking-to-asking.

Sample sizes are stated, not hidden. The Dollar General row rests on 47 listings; the Family Dollar row on 2, and we say so wherever it appears. Conclusions about Family Dollar pricing rest on the national benchmark, not on our two deals.

Corporate events are drawn from company announcements and public reporting: Dollar Tree’s completed divestiture of Family Dollar to Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management (July 2025, approximately $1.0 billion) and Dollar General’s first-quarter fiscal 2026 results and store-opening plans. National asking benchmarks are The Boulder Group’s published Q2 2026 data, not ours.

Nothing here is investment advice, and none of it is a credit rating. Investors evaluating a specific asset should verify current pricing, lease guarantees, and tenant credit independently. Every ANL figure is reproducible from our database on request.

ANL Research publishes a market note every Monday. American Net Lease represents buyers of single-tenant net lease retail.