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Securing a full or partial abatement or exemption on your property’s real estate taxes is a cause for celebration. But that champagne may taste far less sweet if you end up having to share those hard-won benefits with your tenants. 

Make sure that all notice requirements in your lease sync up with each other. When notice rules of one provision conflict with those of another, you run the risk of running afoul of notice requirements even if the notice you actually provide satisfies all requirements of the particular clause to which the notice pertains. 

Include at least four costs in the guaranty cap.

Don’t sign a lease with a federal, state, or municipal government agency unless and until it gets all of the approvals necessary to enter the lease. If the approvals aren’t all in place, the signed lease may turn out to be void or voidable by the government tenant ...

It’s neither contradictory nor uncommon to lease space to a tenant in “as-is” condition while also promising to maintain some or all of that space, such as the roof or parking lot, until the transfer is complete. You just need to be careful about how you word the obligation.

Q: Most tenants at my property require certain amenities and they won’t sign leases for space there if they don’t get them. But I’ve heard of circumstances under which office building and retail property owners have had to get rid of amenities. How can I carve out a right to eliminate amenities in the future if it becomes necessary?

It’s important to send tenants and other parties all notices the lease requires you to provide even if you think they already know the information the notice contains. Your supposition about the tenant’s knowledge may be 100 percent correct. But even if the required notification would come as “old news,” failure to provide it may endanger your rights under the lease.  

If you use a standard lease form that includes blanks for listing appropriate information, don’t leave any of the blanks empty. If you do and end up in a dispute with a tenant, you open the door to the court’s interpreting the meaning of the blank space using “parol” or external evidence in the tenant’s favor. And that can end up costing you big bucks.

On June 20, Commercial Lease Law Insider received the Gold Award for Best Newsletter from the National Association of Real Estate Editors (NAREE). A panel of expert judges from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University selected the award winners announced at NAREE’s annual conference in Austin last week, from a record number of entries.