Virtual Deal Simulator
Behind the Meter: The Vantara Cloud Sale-Leaseback
A hyperscaler wants to turn a $53 million powered shell into growth capital without losing a single megawatt of control — and the whole deal hinges on treating it like a credit instrument, not a building.
You’ll Practice
- Recognize why a credit-tenant sale-leaseback is underwritten as a corporate credit instrument secured by real estate — not as a traditional property acquisition — and why that changes both pricing and diligence.
- Apply a market cap rate to in-place NNN rent to derive a defensible acquisition value for a single-tenant net-lease asset, and defend that number against an unsubstantiated competing bid.
- Distinguish base NNN rent from a power pass-through structure and explain why utility costs sit outside landlord NOI in a powered-shell lease.
- Compare life insurance company, bank, and CMBS single-asset/single-borrower financing for a long-duration credit tenant lease, and identify which capital source matches a 15-year hold with minimal rollover risk.
- Assemble a lender submission package specific to a data center sale-leaseback, separating true underwriting inputs (power capacity letters, commissioning reports, lease abstracts) from irrelevant material.
- Navigate a late-stage lender condition against a hard client deadline without damaging trust or the deal's economics — a judgment call unique to mission-critical infrastructure timelines.
The Mandate: Vantara Cloud Systems
Priya Chandrasekaran, VP of Corporate Real Estate & Capital Markets at Vantara Cloud Systems, emails your desk on a Tuesday morning. Vantara — a top-tier hyperscale cloud platform — completed Prairie Crossing, a 10 critical-IT-megawatt powered-shell data center in New Albany, Ohio, eight months ago, fully leased internally to one of Vantara's largest enterprise customers under a long-term services agreement. Rather than continue to carry the building on its own balance sheet, Vantara wants to sell the real estate to an institutional investor and lease it back for 15 years on a triple-net basis, with utility power costs passed through separately from base rent. The stated goal is capital recycling: redeploy the sale proceeds into new campus construction while retaining full operational control of the facility through the leaseback. She's asking your firm to run the process — and, given how much rides on timing, to help pre-vet acquisition financing so the winning buyer can actually close on schedule.
- Tenant / Seller
- Vantara Cloud Systems, Inc. (investment-grade parent guaranty)
- Asset
- Prairie Crossing Data Campus, New Albany, Ohio — 10 critical-IT-MW powered shell, commissioned 2025
- Proposed Lease Structure
- 15-year triple-net, power pass-through, two 5-year renewal options
- Annual Rent (NOI)
- $3,200,000
- Target Market Cap Rate
- 6.00% (data center / credit-tenant net lease)
- Advisory Scope
- Sell-side disposition + acquisition-debt placement
- Client Deadline
- Sale proceeds needed by fiscal quarter-end to fund next campus land purchase