McDonald's Biggest Secret Is Not the Burger

Let me tell you one of McDonald's biggest secrets. When you think of McDonald's, you probably think of burgers. But behind the burgers is another business entirely: real estate. Even people inside the restaurant industry sometimes miss this.

The model, in plain words

McDonald's often owns or controls the land and buildings where its restaurants operate. It then leases those locations to franchisees — the local operators who actually run each restaurant.

• The franchisee sells the burgers.
• McDonald's collects rent — and royalties on top.

So the company earns twice from the same corner: once from the business that trades there, and once from the ground it trades on. And the numbers are hard to ignore: in 2025, McDonald's reported around $10.4 billion in rental revenue and about $6 billion in royalty revenue from franchised restaurants. Rent, in other words, was the bigger line.

Why this is a real estate story

Think about what the company actually chose to own. Not the ovens, not the staff, not the day-to-day risk of running a restaurant — that sits with the franchisee. What McDonald's holds is the one asset that keeps its value when the burger fashion changes: a well-chosen piece of land on a busy corner, with a building on it that someone must pay to occupy.

A restaurant can have a bad year. A corner on the busiest road in the city does not.

The lesson for Addis Ababa

I am not suggesting you open a burger chain. I am suggesting you look at your own situation through McDonald's eyes:

• If you run a business from rented premises — a shop, a café, a clinic, an office — ask yourself who is really building wealth on that corner. Every month, part of your effort becomes your landlord's asset. Owning your own ground floor, when it becomes possible, changes who the location works for.
• If you are an investor, notice what kind of property earns even when the tenant's business is ordinary: commercial ground floors on real foot-traffic streets, spaces that a business will always need, in locations the city is growing toward.
• If you are choosing between two properties, remember that the building is temporary and the location is permanent. Pay for the location.

One honest note: this is a lesson in how to think, not a promise about any particular property. Every deal has its own numbers, and in Addis those numbers need to be checked on the ground, with documents — never assumed from a story about a company on the other side of the world.

The real estate lesson

Sometimes the value of a business is not only in what it sells, but in what it owns. The burger made McDonald's famous. The land made it rich. Which one are you building?