NewLake Capital Partners

NewLake Capital Partners

NewLake Capital Partners was formed in 2019 as a privately held real estate investment firm and completed its listing on the OTC Markets in 2021. Anthony Coniglio, its founding CEO, structured the firm as an internally managed REIT targeting single-tenant, triple-net-leased industrial and retail properties purpose-built for the regulated cannabis industry. The vehicle was designed to solve a specific capital-stack problem: cannabis operators in states like Pennsylvania, Florida, and Massachusetts needed an institutional-grade buyer for their real estate that would not threaten their state-level plant-touching licenses. The firm executes sale-leaseback transactions, acquiring cultivation and dispensary properties and leasing them back to licensed operators on long-term, triple-net leases. This deployment strategy concentrates on limited-license jurisdictions with supply constraints, where the underlying real estate carries a synthetic barrier to entry beyond the credit of any single tenant. Confirmed tenants include Curaleaf, Cresco Labs, Trulieve, and Columbia Care. By the end of its first full year as a public company, NewLake had deployed over $300 million across approximately 30 properties in ten states, with no direct exposure to the plant-touching activity that would disqualify more traditional REITs and institutional lenders. NewLake's capital sourcing reflects its hybrid posture. In a 2022 follow-on offering, the firm raised roughly $100 million to fund a pipeline of additional sale-leaseback transactions. Its tenant roster is concentrated among the largest multi-state operators, creating a de facto proxy portfolio on the top tier of US cannabis limited-license real estate. The firm operates from Connecticut and is externally labeled as a cannabis REIT, distinct from diversified net-lease peers like Realty Income in that its entire portfolio serves a single regulated industry. May 2024: NewLake reported quarterly results that detailed 100% rent collection and a weighted-average lease term of roughly 14 years across the portfolio (per the firm's official quarterly filings, May 2024). What differentiates NewLake is the deliberate pairing of cannabis credit risk with a highly conventional real estate structure. By holding only the real property and leasing it back on terms that make sale-leaseback math work for operators, the firm sits inside the federal banking gray zone without breaching it — collecting contractually fixed rents without ever touching cannabis inventory or revenue streams directly. This design makes the firm a pure-play vehicle for allocators who want cannabis exposure on a real estate basis, a structure with few direct public-market comparables.