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Owners who lease space to large national retail tenants know that their demands can be hard to resist. Use of the space is the number one concern for these tenants. Often, they ask for flexibility in their use of the space that puts owners at a disadvantage. A lease that allows a tenant to use the space for a wide variety of uses—such as “for any lawful purpose” or “any lawful retail purpose”—can be troublesome.

Many tenants need to customize the space they lease, whether it’s in an office building or shopping center. But altering space—even for simple improvements—can be complicated. So when signing leases, you’ll want to have a work letter agreement—a contract that establishes the terms and conditions of structural changes that will be made to the tenant’s space prior to moving in.

Although leases provide remedies for many types of breaches, it can be hard to collect money later from an erstwhile tenant. Two major financial issues for owners are lease defaults and damage to space. If you’ve dealt with one or both of these potentially very expensive issues in the past, you know the importance of having both a security deposit amount large enough to cover expensive problems and a clause in the lease that will protect you from having to spend y...

Tenants large and small are attracted to the best deals for commercial space. But savvy tenants know that bottom line-friendly deals aren’t limited to items like comparatively low base rent rates or generous concessions and improvement allowances that beat offers from other landlords. Especially if you need to fill vacancies at your center or office building, it’s important to let tenants know that you’ll do your best to control seemingly small costs t...

A big part of successfully running a shopping center is ensuring the safety of tenants, their employees, your employees, and customers. With security cameras or a security guard and alarms, you might think that you have the safety aspect of your operations locked down. But here’s something that could be overlooked and that can come back to burn you, figuratively and literally: inadequate or no insurance for tenants whose businesses create waste that’s danger...

In recent years, filling space at shopping centers with smaller, non-traditional tenants rather than large national stores (many of which are suffering financially) has been a successful strategy for landlords. If you’re taking advantage of this rapidly growing trend, you should be aware that, while in the short term it can boost profits, it carries a substantial amount of risk in the long term. That’s because many smaller tenants often have a limited—...

Rent abatement is frequently mentioned when discussing commercial leases. But it’s not as simple as including a clause that spells out the circumstances under which tenants are entitled to withhold rent. There are many variables and, if you don’t draft rent abatement provisions carefully, you could overlook specific items that can affect you later if the tenant exercises its right.

Tenants often seek financing to help them run their businesses, so you have probably gotten numerous requests from tenants for a “landlord’s lien waiver.” Without the lien waiver, a tenant’s lender may refuse to go through with the loan, or an equipment lessor may refuse to lease expensive equipment to the tenant. A lien waiver typically states that you agree to waive a valuable right—that is, the right to take possession of the tenant&rsqu...

No matter how successful you are at minimizing costs and maximizing profits from your leases with tenants at your shopping center or office building, there’s no reason to overlook new ways to generate more rent and income. After all, the real estate market is never 100 percent certain, and you never know when tenants could decide to leave your center or you could have other issues that cut into your...

When a tenant violates a lease that subsequently ends in termination, shopping center and office building owners might be looking at hefty costs that at least initially will fall on them. Lost rent and the cost and effort of finding a replacement tenant can reach into the tens of thousands of dollars. So can damage left by the tenant, or the ramifications of a key tenant’s departure violating the requirements in other tenants’ leases that it stay open and op...