America was blasted with a "green wave" of marijuana legalization on Election Day. Residents of all five U.S. states voting on initiatives sanctioning the consumption and sale of medical and/or recreational cannabis passed those measures into law.
This will boost the prospects of many marijuana companies, but one in particular stands out for its vast potential. In this video segment from Motley Fool Live recorded on Nov. 18, healthcare and cannabis bureau chief Corinne Cardina Jurney and Motley Fool contributor Eric Volkman zero in on the pot stock that could rise above them all.
Corinne Cardina: The last stock I want to talk about before we get to some of the Slido questions, is a REIT stock, Innovative Industrial Properties (IIPR 1.01%). This one has really benefited from the fact that cannabis companies can't get a traditional loan from a bank in a lot of ways, because it's federally illegal in the U.S.
My question for you is, do you think that these four states that legalized recreational marijuana represent a new, fresh opportunity for IIPR to go in and purchase assets and lease those assets back to the growers?
Eric Volkman: Oh absolutely, yeah. They already have a presence in Arizona, I mean, it's not very big, and they have facilities all over the States. The companies we've already mentioned, they're constantly hungry for capital, they're constantly short of funds, they're constantly losing money.
So Innovative, what they offer, which essentially is they do a lot of sale lease back deals, in which they'll actually buy the property from the company and lease it back to them. That's going to be very compelling for almost anybody.
Yeah, this is a big opportunity for them, because it's all of a sudden, you have five new markets. [But] it's like how do you keep all these balls in the air? Innovative, they're doing pretty well in terms of their finances, but their capital is limited. They can't suddenly open, like, 10 new facilities in each one of these states, close their eyes and wait for somebody to come to them.
