SCOTTSDALE, AZ-STORE Capital has added to its growing investment collection through a $105 million sale-leaseback deal with O’Charley’s Inc. of Nashville, TN.  Under the agreement, the locally based STORE Capital acquired 50 O’Charley’s restaurants and leased them back to O’Charley’s through long-term, triple-net leases.

O’Charley’s is a restaurant company that franchises and operates a total of 342 restaurants under the brand names of O’Charley’s, Ninety Nine Restaurants and Stoney River Legendary Steaks. For STORE Capital, the charm of the deal wasn’t so much the eateries or the food they served, as much as it was that those eateries were single-tenant ones.

“We’re looking at everything in all asset classes,” STORE Capital’s executive vice president, acquisitions , Mary Fedewa tells GlobeSt.com. “The real key to anything we invest in is it needs to be single tenant and operationally essential, with a P&L tied to that box.”

O’Charley’s fit STORE Capital’s sweet spot, but since the latter hung its shingle in May of this year, it’s gone on an investment tear, taking everything from day care centers to dollar stores. The private REIT is a financial company, which makes itself available as a financing tool.

“That’s one of the things we liked about O’Charley’s,” Fedewa says. “They understood our methods and what we were.” O’Charley’s will use the net proceeds from this transaction, as well as available cash, to redeem $115.2 million of its senior notes.

Fedewa says that STORE Capital – which stands for “Single Tenant Operational Real Estate” – has closed upward of $200 million in transactions so far.  She adds that the company is currently evaluating approximately $2 billion more potential opportunities. “The market looks great to us right now,” she remarks. “Our strategy is to have between $1 billion and $2 billion invested by the end of 2012.”