What does grocery CAM usually include?
Parking-lot maintenance, snow, lighting, security, and sometimes landscaping. Some leases push roof, sprinklers, or structural items into CAM. Read the definition and the exclusions, not the nickname.
CAM — Common-area maintenance charges in a shopping-center lease: parking lot, snow, security, and sometimes roof or sprinklers. Grocery tenants often pay a large CAM share because they are the traffic anchor for the strip.
Pull three years of invoices and the last reconciliation before you treat last year’s occupancy as a run-rate. Grocery Store Business Broker — HedgeStone Business Advisors, led by Jason Taken — reads CAM as cash, not as a footnote under base rent. Book a confidential intro with the lease and the recon. Email jason.taken@hedgestone.com if you want that occupancy hour. How do I evaluate the lease? is the short path into lease due diligence.
What the grocery tenant’s CAM covers
The lease defines the bucket. Parking-lot resurfacing, snow, lot lighting, security patrols, and landscaping are the usual contents. Some landlords push roof, sprinklers, or structural repairs into CAM. Some exclude them. Read the definition, the exclusions, and any administrative fee on top of the costs. A triple-net grocery still has a CAM recon. Triple-net names who pays taxes, insurance, and maintenance. CAM is the common-area slice of that stack.
Grocers often pay a large share because they occupy a large fraction of the center or because the lease uses a formula that treats the supermarket as the remaining paying tenant. That is the anchor tax. It is also why a vacant junior-box next door is your problem. Lease assignment diligence should include the current occupancy map, not only the grocery premises.
Reconciliations after a co-tenant leaves
A CAM recon that jumped after a co-tenant went dark is a diligence item, not a year-two surprise. The grocery’s percentage can rise when vacant space drops out of the denominator, or when the landlord reallocates costs the departed tenant used to carry. Pull the occupancy schedule next to the invoices. A co-tenancy clause may cut your rent if a named anchor leaves. It may not cut your CAM. Read both.
Audit rights and caps matter. If the lease lets you audit CAM and nobody has, say so. If there is a cap, confirm whether it is cumulative and whether insurance and taxes sit outside it. Exclusive-use is a different clause: it protects the grocery’s category, not the parking-lot bill.
Occupancy cost against sales productivity
Price base rent plus CAM plus tax and insurance as a percent of sales. The rent-to-sales checker and what is a reasonable rent-to-sales ratio? are the occupancy tools. A pretty base rent with an uncapped CAM recon is not a cheap lease.
FMI’s 2025 supermarket sample shows $19.59 in weekly sales per square foot of selling area and a 2.1 percent average net profit for food retailers. Those are channel facts. They remind you that occupancy sits on a thin net and that productivity has a published supermarket sample. They are not this center’s CAM. A true-up that adds a year of extra charges can erase a year of “extra” SDE. Recast occupancy at the current recon, not at a year the lot was fully leased.
If you have the lease and three years of CAM paper, book the occupancy conversation. Bring the recon, the occupancy map, and last year’s sales. The hour is for the stack you will pay on Monday, not for base rent in isolation.
Worked math for CAM charges on a grocery shopping-center lease
These figures are a teaching walk-through for CAM charges on a grocery shopping-center lease, not a quote and not a sold comp. Order of operations: weekly sales, recast SDE, inventory at cost, then a multiple band.
| Input or output | Illustrative figure |
|---|---|
| Weekly sales (illustrative) | $124,000 |
| Annual sales | $6,448,000 |
| Recast SDE | $199,888 (3.1% of sales) |
| Inventory at cost | $460,571 (~14 turns) |
| Occupancy check | $161,200 / year (2.5% of sales) |
| Low going-concern | $890,330 at 2.15x SDE + inventory |
| High going-concern | $1,000,269 at 2.70x SDE + inventory |
| Sketch DSCR on a note | 1.41 |
If weekly sales or shrink move 8 percent, the SDE and the note move with them. That is why Jason Taken starts with scan data and the lease, not with a neighbor's rumor multiple.
Book the intro call with your side of the table ready: seller files or buyer capital. The calendar is the only next step.