Most restaurant firms, by their operational nature, own and operate a large amount of corporate real estate (CRE), even though real estate is not their primary business activity. This is not only common across restaurant firms of different sizes but also linked to their sales and profitability. Borrowing the arguments of resource-based theory and using financial data for the years between 1999 and 2014, this study investigated the relationship between CRE holdings and restaurant firm performance in the United States. Briefly, our findings demonstrate that the CRE ratio and the rent ratio, in particular, have different impacts on restaurant firms’ financial performance and market-driven risk structures when different forward lags are considered.