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Don’t wait for a project to begin to address the issue. Put key redevelopment rights in the lease.

Landlords who rely on tenants' inflated sales projections are apt to get burned.

Renting to a food truck is generally riskier than renting to an established business.

Don’t get burned if the tenant doesn’t complete the improvements work.

Holdovers can be a nightmare for landlords. When tenants don’t clear out after their lease expires, you may have to go to court to evict them. Meanwhile, the replacement tenant can’t move into the space and could end up suing you. Or, if you haven’t yet re-rented the space, the presence of the holdover tenant may hinder your efforts to find a new tenant. Adding insult to injury, if the rental market is hot, the holdover tenant may end up paying you muc...

Boilerplate leases don’t usually address these scenarios.

Perhaps the only positive aspect of the COVID-19 shutdowns, at least from a commercial leasing perspective, is how it made landlords aware of just how dependent on their tenants they are. The real winners of the pandemic were the landlords that found a way to work together with tenants to adjust their leasing arrangements so as to ensure their mutual survival. That approach could be the formula for surviving not only public health emergencies but other unforeseen crises...

Jump-start your leases to prepare for tenant demand and legal compliance.

With electric vehicle (EV) purchases on the rise, a new fixture has begun to appear in the parking lots of office buildings, shopping centers, medical facilities, and other commercial properties across the country: the EV charging station. The Department of Energy estimates that as of 2022, 46,000 commercial EV stations have been installed in the U.S., as compared to just 10,7...

Percentage rent tenants are typically required to give landlords the monthly sales reports they use to calculate their percentage rent. All too often, though, the tenant provides only its gross sales figure—the amount on which percentage rent is calculated under the lease agreement. It omits sales from transactions that you’ve agreed to exclude from gross sales, such as discounts to sales provided to its employees. And that can cause problems. For one thing,...

One of the few positives to emerge from the pandemic for commercial leasing was how it got landlords and tenants to set aside historical mistrust and work together for their mutual welfare and survival. While the pressing issue at the height of the COVID-19 crisis was restructuring rent obligations, there are lots of other leasing issues where this approach could do both sides a world of good. Among these are lease provisions addressing insurance and responsibility for ...