What Happened: A shopping center leased space in its parking lot to a food truck operator for a five-year term. The tenant stopped paying rent, and the landlord sued. After a two-day trial, the court ruled that the tenant breached the parking lot lease “by failing to pay the full term of the lease,” and ordered it to pay the landlord $39,858 in damages, including rent for the four months still left on the lease that hadn’t yet accrued. The tenant and its guarantors appealed, contending that the court was wrong to award accelerated rent.   

Ruling: The Florida appeals court agreed and reversed the part of the ruling requiring four months of accelerated rent.

Reasoning: As in most states, landlords can’t collect future rent from a defaulting tenant unless and only to the extent that the lease expressly allows for accelerated rent. The parking lot lease in this case didn’t include an acceleration of rent clause. So, there was no contractual basis to award the landlord accelerated rent for the four-month period between the date of the judgment and the date the parking lot lease was scheduled to expire. Moreover, because the landlord took possession of the premises, its damages were limited to the difference between the rent the tenant should have paid and any substitute rent the landlord was able to recover. The landlord also had a corresponding duty to mitigate its damages by making reasonable efforts to find a substitute tenant to re-let the premises during that period.  

• Hourglass Ent., LLC v. NRG Invs., Inc., 2025 Fla. App. LEXIS 5375, 2025 LX 255385, 2025 WL 1943968