Subleases can be more complicated than they seem. It’s not just a matter of allowing a tenant to give its space either temporarily or until the end of its lease to a replacement tenant. To protect themselves, owners should carefully draft sublease provisions.

Making a profit from tenants at your shopping center or mall depends on many factors—one of which is the key percentage rent arrangement. Percentage rent allows you to collect not only base rent, but also a percentage of the tenant’s gross sales done at the space it leases from you. But percentage rent doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It can be diminished by variables like the tenant’s success—not just with you, but wherever else it is doing busi...

If you own a shopping center or office building and have financial difficulties, you may be dealing with one, or even several, liens filed against the property. A savvy tenant knows that if it doesn’t have priority if you become bankrupt, it could be dramatically affected, up to and including having to move out of its space. That’s why it might demand that you agree to sign a “memorandum of lease” when you sign the lease with it. A memorandum of ...

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.