Say you own the building your veterinary practice runs out of, and a few years ago you sold the practice to one of the national groups. The group pays you rent now. Someday you'll want to sell the building too, and when you do, the first thing a serious buyer checks in the lease is the date it ends.
This fall we went through 73 vet buildings listed for sale around the country to see how much that date matters. Of everything an owner has some say over, it was the one thing that showed up in the asking price every time we looked. Rent bumps, the tenant's brand and the age of the building didn't register in an earlier, smaller sample from September.
With 7 to 10 years left on the lease, a building asks roughly 15% more than the same building at the same rent with 2 or 3 years left. If your lease is getting short, deal with it before you list.
What we looked at
Between 22 September and 13 October we pulled single-tenant veterinary listings from Crexi, a national listing site, three separate times. We threw out portfolios, gross and modified-gross leases, owner-user sales, buildings listed more than once, and anything missing a price, a rent figure or a lease end date. That left 73 buildings, from small-town clinics to large referral hospitals.
For each building we worked out the cap rate the seller was asking for, which is the annual rent divided by the asking price, and how many years were left on the lease. We also read fifteen of the offering memoranda cover to cover. Those are the packages brokers send to buyers who sign a confidentiality agreement, and we used them to check rent bumps, what the landlord is on the hook for, and who actually signed the lease.
Everything here is an asking price. Buildings usually sell for less than they're listed at, so don't read the dollar figures as what you'd walk away with. What we're confident about is how prices change from one lease length to the next.
What term is worth
Lengthen the lease and the asking price goes up, at least until you get to about ten years.
At the same rent, 7 to 10 years of lease left asks about 15% more than 2 to 3
Typical asking price for a veterinary building paying $100,000 a year, by years left on the lease
Scroll the chart sideways to see every band.
View the data
| Years left on the lease | Listings | Typical asking price | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 2 yrs | 9 | $1,184k | $1,068k–$1,351k |
| 2–3.5 | 13 | $1,224k | $1,134k–$1,266k |
| 3.5–5 | 22 | $1,291k | $1,217k–$1,426k |
| 5–7 | 14 | $1,307k | $1,248k–$1,379k |
| 7–10 | 8 | $1,402k | $1,367k–$1,467k |
| Over 10 | 7 | $1,278k | $1,215k–$1,358k |
On $100,000 of annual rent, the typical building with 2 to 3½ years left was listed at about $1.22 million. Buildings with 7 to 10 years left were listed at about $1.40 million. That's roughly $180,000 of difference on identical rent.
We wouldn't quote any one band as a price. The 7-to-10-year group has only eight listings, and prices inside every group are spread wide, as the lines on the chart show. But the step up from short leases to longer ones turned up in each of the three pulls, and it's too large to put down to noise.
Why buyers care so much
A buyer is paying today for rent they'll collect over years, and the lease end date tells them how many of those years are promised. Their bank looks at it the same way. Lenders size and price commercial loans against the lease, and a lease that ends before the loan does usually means a smaller loan or worse terms. The buyer passes that cost back to you in the price.
The buyer also has to sell eventually, and whatever term they buy, they'll be selling with less of it. On top of that, vet buildings are expensive to re-lease. Surgery suites, kennel runs, floor drains and shielded x-ray rooms mean a lot to a veterinary practice and very little to a dentist or a retailer, so if the practice leaves, the building can sit empty for a long time.
That same build-out is why practices tend to stay put and renew, and buyers know it. It's part of the reason a short lease on a vet building doesn't wreck the price. But buyers won't pay full value for a renewal that hasn't been signed.
Past ten years
The price didn't keep climbing. The seven listings with more than ten years left asked about what the 3½-to-7-year group did, and less than the 7-to-10 group.
Seven is a thin sample, and several of those are large specialty hospitals that sell to a different set of buyers than a general practice does. Even so, nothing we found suggests a 15- or 20-year lease gets you a better price than a 10-year one. If you're the tenant as well as the seller, the longer lease also keeps your practice on that rent for a long time.
If you're planning to sell
Owners come at this from two directions. Some sold the practice to a group and kept the building, so the group is now their tenant. Others still own the practice and are weighing a sale-leaseback, where they sell the building to an investor and sign a lease to stay on. The advice is about the same either way.
Count your term from the day a sale would close, not from today. Listing, marketing and closing a building takes months, so a lease with five years left now will have closer to four by the time a buyer is pricing it.
If you're under about five years, try to extend before you list, because short leases are where the market takes its biggest discount. Renewal options help less than owners tend to think. We didn't count them, and most buyers don't either, since it's the tenant who decides whether to use one.
If you're setting up a sale-leaseback, ten years or so of signed term gets you close to full value. Past that, we didn't see buyers paying more.
And look closely at who signs the extension. Careful buyers and their lenders check which company actually signed the lease. The name out front doesn't count for much. You want the same company that signed the original lease, which is often the group's operating company, or one with more money behind it.
Notes on method
The 73 listings are single-tenant veterinary buildings on Crexi, captured on 22 September, 30 September and 13 October 2026. Where a building appeared more than once, we kept its latest price and counted it once. Cap rate is annual rent divided by asking price. Remaining term runs to the lease end date as of the day the listing was captured, and renewal options aren't counted.
Bigger buildings tend to ask lower cap rates, so before comparing lease lengths we adjusted every listing to a common deal size of about $1.6 million. Without that step the bands would be comparing referral hospitals with small clinics. In the full set, the link between remaining term and asking price is statistically significant at the 1% level, which means it's very unlikely to be chance, and it pointed the same way in all three pulls. We're more sure of the direction than of the exact size. Rent bumps, tenant brand and building age were tested on the September sample, where we had offering memoranda, and none of them moved price by a measurable amount.
A few caveats. These are asking prices, not sales. They come from one listing site, so off-market deals are missing. Your local market may not look like the national one, and this is a single moment in time.
Corbel Partners buys and holds veterinary, medical and light industrial real estate. We write up some of what we find along the way. This paper is general market research, not investment, legal or tax advice.