Convenience store property loans

Ardent Capital Group brings the same method to every client: execution and strategy, clear advice for smart lending, and long-term growth. That means the right lender, structure and timing, straight advice so you borrow with confidence, and today's deal built toward where you want to be tomorrow. We are specialists in helping business owners secure finance to purchase their own property, and we understand the complex structures that often sit around it, including multiple trusts, holding companies and self-managed super funds. A modest retail income deserves to be read as the solid asset it is, so we place your file with lenders who genuinely understand owner-occupied retail and back the premises on the real strength of the store. We stay in your corner well past settlement, right up to when you start weighing a second site. Every figure is subject to serviceability, lender appetite and approval.

For a store with no fuel on site, standard commercial security typically gears to 75% to 80% of the property value, and adding equity from a property you already own can reach up to 100% of the purchase price. A site that sells fuel gears lower, so talk to us.

It depends entirely on whether the site sells fuel. A convenience store with no fuel on it is standard commercial security, in the same bucket as an office or a warehouse. It is valued on comparable sales and the rent it could command, not on what your business earns, and being in that bucket is why it borrows further than most operators expect. A convenience store attached to a service station is a different asset. A fuel site is assessed as a specialised asset, it gears lower, and it goes to a different list of lenders. We establish which one you are buying before anything else, so the deposit and the term you are planning around are the real ones.

The lender list, the gearing, the valuation basis and the settlement conditions all change. A fuel site is assessed as a specialised asset because of the underground tanks and the environmental obligations attached to them, so it gears lower than a plain shop and fewer lenders will write it. An environmental site assessment is a condition of settlement, so it is commissioned early and budgeted for rather than left to the last fortnight. The age and compliance status of the tanks, and any remediation history on the site, feed both the valuation and the credit decision. None of this makes a fuel site unfundable. We fund them. It simply means it is a different piece of work to a shop, and it needs to be run as one from day one.

It caps it. A lender will not write a loan term that runs past your right to trade from the site, so the years remaining on the franchise agreement, including any options you can actually exercise, set the outer limit on the term, in the same way a lease does. That is why the agreement is a finance question before it is a legal one. If you are buying a store with three years left on a franchise agreement, you are having a very different conversation to one with a fresh term and two renewal options, and it is better to know that before you negotiate the price.

Yes. Franchisor consent to the transfer is a condition precedent, and without it there is no deal, no matter how well the finance is going. The franchisor may also hold a right of first refusal over the store, which means they can step in and take it themselves on the terms you have negotiated. Both need to be dealt with early, not after you have spent money on due diligence. We build the consent process into the finance timetable from the first conversation, so the approval and the consent land together and the settlement date holds.

Both, and a lender reads it as one picture rather than two. Long trading hours are the convenience business model. They are how the store captures the trade that a supermarket cannot, and the overnight and early-morning takings are real. They are also what you pay for, because that roster is on penalty rates, and the wage line is the largest controllable cost in the accounts. A credit team reads it hard. The answer is not to hide it, it is to show the hours, the roster and the takings they produce side by side, so the wage bill is understood as the engine of the business rather than a warning sign. That is how we present it.

As what they are: large revenue lines with thin margins and their own regulatory exposure. Tobacco can be a substantial share of turnover in a convenience store while contributing far less to gross profit, and lottery commission works the same way. A lender is therefore reading the revenue mix, not just the headline turnover, and it will want to see how much of your gross profit actually comes from the lines you control, such as food service, coffee and drinks. We set the mix out clearly in the submission so a credit team is assessing the store on its real margin rather than making its own assumptions.

Yes, and it is the most common convenience purchase we do. Because you already trade from the store, you know exactly what it earns hour by hour, the lender can see a proven operator in the premises, and the rent you stop paying to your landlord is added back when a lender tests whether you can service the loan. The lease you are currently on is also the best available evidence of what the property is worth to a tenant, which helps the valuation rather than hindering it.

Two to three years of business financial statements and tax returns for the store, BAS lodgements, and point-of-sale reports showing the sales mix and the trade by time of day. Margin in convenience is uneven across the shelf, so a lender is reading the mix and the consistency rather than a headline turnover figure, and on an extended-hours site it will read the wage line against the overnight takings. Where the store has traded under a previous owner, the vendor’s figures are the starting point, and we help you interrogate them before you rely on them.

For a full-doc application, most lenders want two to three years of business financial statements and tax returns, personal tax returns for all guarantors, the contract of sale, the lease, the franchise agreement, and the point-of-sale or trade reports. On a fuel site, add the environmental site assessment and the tank compliance records. Plenty of operators do not fit a standard full-doc assessment neatly. Alt-doc and low-doc routes exist, supported by an accountant’s declaration, BAS lodgements and business bank statements, at a slightly higher rate. We work through your income situation upfront to identify the best approach.

Yes, it is possible, and we arrange these. Retail premises sit comfortably inside an SMSF purchase, more comfortably than most asset classes. It is also one of the more intricate purchases in commercial finance, and the detail is what decides whether it works. The fund borrows under a limited recourse borrowing arrangement, so the store sits in a separate holding trust and the lender can only come after that one property. From 10 August 2026 a new arrangement can only be used for business real property. A shop trading wholly as a business qualifies, and it does not matter whether you or a tenant runs it. A shop with a flat above it on the same title generally does not, which catches a lot of the shop-top strip retail on the market. Your operating company leases the store back from the fund, in writing, at market rent supported by an independent appraisal, and the rent has to actually be paid. Cross-collateralisation is not available inside super, so the fund needs its own deposit and the 100% LVR structures described elsewhere on this page do not work here. Lenders cap SMSF lending below a standard purchase, generally between 65% and 80%, and want cash left in the fund after settlement. We know this sounds complicated. It is, and that is exactly why we do it every day. Reach out to our team and we will guide you through the entire process. We structure the finance, tell you which lenders will take a convenience store as SMSF security and on what terms, and bring in the SMSF specialists and licensed advisers who set the fund side up. You will not be working it out on your own. Get that right and it is a solid, compliant structure.

Then there is no property for a lender to mortgage, and it becomes a different kind of loan. You are buying goodwill, fit-out, plant and stock, along with the right to occupy under a lease, so the funding comes from your cash flow, from security you already hold, and from equipment finance over the plant. The loan term is also capped by the years left on the lease, and on a franchised store by the years left on the franchise agreement as well, so the more time your lease has to run, the longer the loan can be. We can arrange this, and we will tell you plainly which parts of it are fundable before you spend money on due diligence.

It depends on your state, and the rule most people repeat is wrong. There is no statutory minimum term in New South Wales, where it was repealed in 2017, or in Queensland, which never had one. Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, the ACT, the Northern Territory and Tasmania each set a five year default, and even there it can be waived by certificate. If you are buying a business rather than the freehold, what matters commercially is not the statutory minimum but how many years you actually have left, because that caps your loan term, and on a franchised store the franchise agreement caps it too.

Most of the time, no. We are paid a commission by the lender once your loan settles. Where a purchase requires significant preparation, a small mandate fee may apply, and we will always be upfront about this before work begins.

Although we are based in Sydney, we service clients across all major Australian cities, including Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart, along with their surrounding regional areas. Wherever your store is located, we can arrange your finance.

Although our main speciality is property loans for business owners, we also assist with refrigeration finance for convenience stores and working capital for convenience stores. On asset finance, that covers fridges, freezers and drinks cabinets, coffee machines and food-service equipment, shelving and gondola, security and surveillance systems, and point-of-sale. On working capital, we arrange business overdrafts, lines of credit and cash-flow funding to carry stock, to fund a refit between trading peaks, and to cover a heavy wage roster on an extended-hours site.

Yes. That is our core ethos, helping you understand the right strategy, structure and clear advice from the very first conversation. Our main borrower profiles are convenience operators and retail owner-occupiers seeking finance from $100,000 upwards, and buying the shop you already trade from is very often a first commercial purchase, so it is well within our wheelhouse. We will walk you through what the property will actually value at, what your franchise agreement does to the term, and the deposit you will genuinely need, before you commit to anything.