Dive Brief:
- Alimentation Couche-Tard has put 68 convenience stores scattered across 21 U.S. states up for sale, according to a recent press release from NRC Realty and Capital Advisors, the firm handling the marketing and sale of these locations.
- Each store is about 2,300 square feet and has roughly 23,000 square feet of parking lot space. NCR said 37 of these stores are fee-owned, while 31 are leased. Forty-two of these locations sell fuel. Couche-Tard has listed all of these stores without fuel supply agreements or a c-store banner.
- NRC is accepting bids for these locations until Nov. 16. It’s unclear if all 68 stores must be bought together or if a buyer can purchase a select number of them.
Dive Insight:
This isn’t the first time Couche-Tard has tapped NRC to help it sell convenience stores. It’s the advisory firm’s third sale for Circle K convenience stores over the past three years, according to the announcement.
The retailer previously used NRC’s services to help it sell nearly 300 locations in the U.S. and Canada, and the two companies still have an ongoing sale process of 110 locations in the U.S. and Canada, according to NRC’s website.
“We have some good sites in this offering which will be of interest to individual operators and smaller companies,” Evan Gladstone, NRC’s executive managing director, said in the announcement. “We have a few stores in California, Florida and Texas as well [as] larger groups in Indiana and Ohio.”
Founded in 1989, NRC has sold more than 15,000 properties for c-stores and other businesses. The company has also worked with several other c-store and fuel retailers besides Couche-Tard, including 7-Eleven, Sunoco, BP and Global Partners.
This continues a busy year for Couche-Tard on the mergers and acquisitions front. The convenience retailer has purchased hundreds of U.S. locations through several deals, including 112 Mapco sites, 45 Big Red Stores locations and the 11-store Dion’s Enterprises chain.
Couche-Tard also agreed to acquire nearly 2,200 retail sites in Europe from French oil giant TotalEnergies for $3.3 billion in March. That deal closed in June.
Laval, Quebec-based Couche-Tard operates more than 5,700 c-stores in the U.S. It is the second-largest c-store company in North America behind 7-Eleven.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of states where Couche-Tard is selling stores.
