At first, a guaranty from a tenant that you’re unsure about seems like a great safety net. Another party will take over the tenant’s lease obligations if it fails to do so itself, so you won’t be left on the hook trying to mitigate the financial or other damage. In isolation, a guaranty with no limits can work well. But you’re likely to find tenants and their guarantors demanding certain limits on guaranties. There are several common limits they ...

In theory, a sublet seems easy: When you let a tenant sublet its space, the subtenant pays the tenant its rent due under the sublease, and the tenant pays you its rent or percentage rent due under the lease. While that’s the way sublet scenarios are designed and expected to work, you can’t count on the tenant carrying out its part of the bargain. After you’ve consented to a sublet, the tenant could decide not, or be unable, to pay you—even if it&...

A tenant’s lease violation is never good news for commercial real estate owners, but each type of violation has different consequences—ranging from annoying to disastrous. If your lease doesn’t give you a “self-help” right, you might find yourself facing the difficult situation of not being able to fix problems that the tenant is responsible for, and incurring unnecessary damage and costs in the meantime, and wasting time and energy.

It’s an undertaking for any tenant to scout out prospective commercial space, negotiate a lease, and then deal with the logistics and expense of moving into that space. So, after going through all of the effort to get established at a property, it’s not unusual for a big tenant that’s leasing an entire building to ask for a “right of first refusal”—that is, a right to buy the space if and when a third party offers to buy it. If the te...

If you own commercial property and are contemplating branching out and acquiring more properties, you might not know where to start. A good jumping off point is understanding what type of leasing opportunities are available—and their interplay with the commercial real estate market now. Although in many areas of the country, there’s been a steady uptick in real estate development and even a boom in affluent areas where mixed-use properties are more popular t...

Every lease gives an owner certain remedies, such as eviction or the collection of damages, that the owner can use if something the tenant does or fails to do fits the lease’s definition of an “event of default.” But what if your lease doesn’t clearly define what acts or omissions by the tenant are events of default? You could be powerless to do anything even though you think you should be allowed to use your remedies.

The ability to turn a profit by selling products online has in recent years drastically reduced some business’s need for physical space. But commercial real estate leases tend to have terms that span several years, and sometimes decades, so a tenant could’ve signed a 20-year lease at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy. New tenants want to have the option of getting rid of some of their space if online sales soar and they don’t have a nee...

Setting a workable commencement date for a lease to begin is one of the most important aspects of lease negotiations. But it often isn’t thought through by either owners or tenants. As with many overlooked parts of a lease deal, it takes a back seat to big ticket items like cotenancy clauses, renewal options, and use provisions. However, so many things depend on when the lease begins, you need to make an informed decision about how you should set a lease commencem...

Your shopping center leases probably require each tenant to pay its share of the center’s fire insurance, liability insurance, and other kinds of insurance. However, if you want to pass through your insurance costs to your tenants as a separate component of common area maintenance (CAM) costs solely by using a standard formula based on “gross leasable area,” it could leave you on the hook for costs you thought would be paid by your tenants.

Nonpayment of rent is the most common breach of a tenant’s lease—and can be a major signal that trouble is on the horizon. That trouble could come in many forms: A tenant becomes bankrupt or has financial issues, it withholds its rent because of a perceived problem that you’ll have to hash out, or it has found a better space and is preparing to move out despite its lease.