First NNN closed on a small restaurant pad, and the surprise is how little I do

I'm starting from zero so this is useful just as a picture of what owning one looks like. Two tasks in four months is not what I pictured real estate being at all. What happens in year 11 when the lease ends, do you just start over finding a tenant?

The roof clause is the one that gets everybody. I hold land mostly, but the few buildings I've had taught me that "NNN" on a listing is marketing language and the lease is the actual document. Roof, structure, parking lot, HVAC replacement. Those four get carved out in a hundred different ways and each carve-out is a real dollar number you should be pricing before you offer.

To answer @ember and fill in the piece @quill glossed over: there's a spectrum, and the names aren't standardized. What people call a true triple-net or absolute-net puts everything on the tenant including roof and structure, so the owner's only job is collecting rent. What @quill has is a net lease with landlord obligations carved back, sometimes called NN or double-net, where taxes and insurance and day-to-day maintenance sit with the tenant but capital items stay with the owner. Same building, same tenant, materially different cash flow over a 15-year hold.

So when you compare two listings at the same cap rate, you are not comparing the same thing. A 6.3 with an owner-funded roof and HVAC is a lower real yield than a 6.3 where the tenant owns those. That's part of why absolute-net deals with strong credit trade tighter.

On the year-11 question: at expiration the tenant either exercises an option at whatever rent the lease specifies, negotiates a new deal, or leaves. If they leave you own an empty 2,400 sf restaurant pad and you're finding a new user, which is real work and possibly real capital to reconfigure. QSR pads generally re-tenant better than most single-tenant retail because the drive-through and the site layout suit other food operators, but that depends entirely on the corner. @quill, the number I'd want in a file somewhere is what a non-credit local operator would pay per foot for that pad. That's your floor if the guaranty ever stops mattering.

$28k credit against a $41k estimate and you still bought. Was that because you'd already sunk the diligence cost, or did you decide the 13k gap was small against the rent? Asking because I'm about to negotiate my first repair credit on a rental and I don't know where the walk line is.