Which companies are net lease REITs?

Sep 26, 2026

When we started building REIT Filings, the first question was which companies to cover. There's no official list of net lease REITs, so we had to pick one, or make our own.

What a net lease is

In most commercial leases, the landlord pays a building's running costs out of the rent. In a net lease, the tenant pays them on top of the rent: property taxes, insurance, and repairs and maintenance. When the tenant pays all three, it's called a triple-net lease, the usual kind for these companies. So what the landlord collects is close to the rent itself.

Getty Realty is a typical example. At the end of March 2026 it owned 1,191 properties, mostly gas stations, convenience stores and car washes, each leased to a business that runs it. Its leases had 10.1 years left on average. 92.1% of its rent came from leases with a fixed yearly increase, averaging 1.8% a year, and 99.7% of its properties were leased.

The leases are long across the group. At Agree Realty, NNN REIT and Getty, the average lease had between 7.8 and 10.1 years left.

What we found

We looked at the lists people already use, and they didn't agree.

• reitrankings.com listed 16 companies and didn't say how it chose them.
• Hoya Capital listed 20 and didn't say where its list came from.
• The Colterpoint Net Lease Real Estate Index held 22, chosen by written rules.

The 16 on reitrankings.com are on all three. They're the companies everyone agrees on, such as Realty Income, Agree Realty and W. P. Carey.

Hoya added four: Safehold, which owns the land under buildings and leases out the land, plus three companies the index doesn't hold (Curbline Properties, Modiv Industrial and Generation Income Properties).

The index added six: Safehold too, and five that neither site counted.

• VICI Properties and Gaming & Leisure Properties, which own casinos.
• STAG Industrial and LXP Industrial Trust, which own warehouses.
• Innovative Industrial Properties, which leases buildings to cannabis growers.

We could have made our own list. But then every company we left in or out would be our call, made case by case. We chose the index.

Why we use the index

Its rules are written down. Colterpoint owns the index and Nasdaq calculates it. The main test is in the prospectus of the fund that tracks it, filed with the SEC: a company must earn at least 85% of its earnings or revenue from net lease real estate. Nasdaq's rulebook adds the rest. A company must also:

• be listed on a US exchange;
• be worth at least $200 million;
• trade at least 10,000 shares a day on average over three months;
• have at least 20% of its shares freely traded.

It changes on a schedule. The members are reviewed every quarter. Colterpoint decides which companies count as net lease, and Nasdaq checks the size and trading rules and makes the changes, which take effect on the third Friday of March, June, September and December. Our list follows the review of June 19, 2026.

Investors use it. A fund on the NYSE, ticker NETL, has tracked the index since March 2019. On June 1, 2026 its three largest members were Agree Realty at 8.5%, Realty Income at 8.3% and NNN REIT at 8.2%.

Anyone can check it. The index decides who's in by published rules, so you can see why each company is on our list.

We cover all 22, including the casino, warehouse and cannabis landlords the other lists leave out. The index counts their leases as net leases, even though their buildings look different. When a metric doesn't fit a company's business, the value's panel says so.

See the 22 companies and how we read their reports.

This is information about disclosures, not investment advice.