NEW YORK CITY—With a $500-million initial public offering this past November, STORE Capital moved out of the private-capital space it has occupied for the past three-and-a-half years. President and CEO Christopher Volk, who has taken two other companies public, had the distinction of ringing the first opening bell of 2015 at the New York Stock Exchange.

The ceremony not only ushered in the new year, but also capped a productive 12-month period for the Scottsdale, AZ-based net lease REIT, whose name stands for Single Tenant Operational Real Estate. STOR's real estate investment portfolio grew from $1.7 billion in gross investment dollars representing 622 property locations at Dec. 31, 2013 to $2.8 billion and nearly 950 property locations a year later. With a market capitalization north of $2.25 billion, the company is focused on restaurant, retail and industrial properties, and Volk sees plenty of growth opportunities ahead, not only for his company but also for net lease REITs in general. We spoke with Volk in a one-on-interview at GlobeSt.com's offices earlier this week.

GlobeSt.com: With STOR a newly public company, how does this open up access to potential investors?

Volk: Since REITs pay out 90% of their taxable income, the best way for them to continue growing is to buy new assets and raise new equity capital. So when you list a company on the New York Stock Exchange, you're basically making a strategic decision that this is where you want to be for the foreseeable future as far as raising equity capital is concerned.

You have choices: do you raise capital privately, which we have done for three-and-a-half years, or do you raise it publicly? Our choice to go to the public markets is because we think it will lower our cost of capital and make us more efficient, not just today, but in the future. We're still a controlled company, with Oaktree Capital Management owning over 70%, but as we raise capital over the next several years, that will diminish.

GlobeSt.com: In 2015, what do you see as the sweet spot, or sweet spots, for STOR?

Volk: You have to start with the notion that if you take every net lease REIT out there, in aggregate they probably have less than 2% market share, whereas if you were to look at large shopping centers, over 90% are in the REIT space. Net lease ownership is still very fragmented from an institutional standpoint, and I think that that will be fuel for some of the fastest growth in the REIT space over the next few years.

We tend to be very customer-/tenant-centric, and the real estate follows from that. And we have a great real estate portfolio: 950 properties in 46 states, and we don't have a single tenant that represents more than 4% of our revenue. So it's a very diversified, high-quality portfolio. But that starts with being able to create a value proposition for those tenants.

GlobeSt.com: The tenant mix is well diversified. Tell us about the types of tenants represented in that mix.

Volk: Restaurants represent about 25% of our revenues, and then nothing else is more than 10%. Restaurants have a large representation largely because that's where we came from. When we started Franchise Finance, which was our first public company, it was 100% restaurants, and then we got into other sectors along the way before we sold that company to GE in 2001. The second reason we have so many restaurants is that there are so many to be had. If you're looking for the sector with the highest retail sales, it's car dealerships; if you're looking for the one with the most locations, it's restaurants.

GlobeSt.com: Yet within the restaurant space, different tenants have different business models and customer bases. That must help to diversify within that sector.

Volk: If you look at our portfolio today, more than 70% is in what we consider service-based industries. That could be movie theatres or restaurants, neither of which is pure retail. Service-based industries are always interesting because it's harder to buy services over the Internet; it's harder to find another delivery mode for a service. As a result, people in real estate like to focus on these industries, because the probability of functional obsolescence tends to be low.

GlobeSt.com: That being said, from an investor standpoint it's still a sector with pretty high barriers to entry in terms of understanding it.

Volk: Running a net lease REIT, if done properly, is actually a pretty complex endeavor. A lot of people assume that because somebody is writing you a check every month, there's less that you have to do. We don't have architects on staff and we don't do development, but we do add value for our investors by focusing on our key competencies.

GlobeSt.com: Are there potential tailwinds or, conversely, headwinds heading into 2015?

Volk: Right now, the market feels attractive. The 10-year Treasury today is scarcely above 2% and the availability of capital is pretty favorable. Certainly, we maintain a strong pipeline of transactions. But I don't take any of these things for granted. The biggest shocks that come into the marketplace tend to be the shocks that no one sees coming.