Why a 9.2 cap single tenant office isn't really a 9.2 cap once re-tenanting is priced in
Consider a 22,000 sf single tenant suburban office, two story, built 1998, roof replaced 2019, occupied entirely by a regional insurance back office at $14.50/sf NNN with 4.5 years left and one five year option at market. Asking $2.35M, $107/sf, with reported NOI of $216k implying a 9.2 percent cap, purchased for cash with no debt. The number that gets missed is the cost of the lease ending. Local leasing brokers in this class of building commonly quote $45 to $65/sf of turnover TI for a full floor deal, plus 5 to 9 months of downtime and commissions around 6 percent of the lease value. On 22,000 sf that lands somewhere between $1.0M and $1.5M of cash exposure at year five, against a $2.35M purchase price. Accrued properly over the hold, that turns a headline 9.2 percent into something closer to 4 percent. Two ways to handle it at the offer stage: bid at a price where the re-tenanting reserve is already funded out of the discount, or ask the seller to escrow a TI holdback at closing while keeping the price intact. The escrow route is cleaner underwriting but sellers rarely agree to it. What's easy to underweight on a building like this is the single-tenant concentration itself, since there's no blended rent roll to soften the year the lease actually ends, the entire building's income event happens on one date.