Real Estate Franchises

The real estate category on PlainFranchise covers 8 franchise brands with publicly available Franchise Disclosure Documents, making it a narrower sector where the handful of listed brands account for most of the investable, publicly disclosed franchise inventory — a setup where brand-level due diligence matters more than sector-level averages. The average initial investment across these brands runs from $69K to $258K, a 273% low-to-high spread that mirrors the underlying cost variance across site size, market tier, and buildout scope within the sector. The typical initial franchise fee lands near $31K, which is the upfront payment for trademark rights, training, and territory — it is a sunk cost, not a capital expenditure.

Ongoing royalties average 5.4% of gross sales across the real estate cohort, the single biggest ongoing cost line in most franchise P&Ls. On a franchise doing $500K in annual revenue, that rate translates to roughly $27K per year flowing to the franchisor before the advertising fund, rent, and labor — which is why negotiating even a small royalty discount (where allowed) materially changes unit economics. Item 19 disclosure rates vary inside this sector; when a brand does publish Item 19 numbers, compare them against non-disclosing peers by requesting unit-level data from Item 20 contacts. Aggregate franchised-and-company unit count across the sector runs near 41,700 locations, giving a rough sense of saturation and available white-space markets.

Use this sector page as a comparative screen rather than a ranking. Two brands with similar investment ranges and royalty rates can produce radically different franchisee outcomes depending on supply-chain leverage, real-estate strategy, territory protection, and the quality of franchisor support — details that never show up in sector averages. The cards below sort alphabetically by default; click into any brand to see its full FDD-derived investment profile, Item 19 financial performance (where disclosed), unit-count trajectory, and termination/non-renewal rate. For sector-level macro context, cross-reference with industry benchmarks on PlainBizBench and SBA-approved-lender activity on PlainLender before signing an FDD receipt.