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By Scott Frank, Esq.

Leases with nationally branded retail franchise tenants can be a real boon to a shopping center. That coffee, donut, or hamburger shop, or the family hair salon, can become a great traffic generator that helps increase the revenues of all your center's tenants.

As a commercial property owner, you strive to maintain 100 percent occupancy with good, law-abiding tenants that always pay rent on time and in full. While no tenant can ever be a sure bet, you might think that a federal agency is about as close to perfect as you can get. Given the government's source of income—our tax dollars—it should be the safest deal available.

Medical office leasing is a hot market. And if you're like many office building owners, you're thinking about renting space in your building to a medical office tenant. But unlike regular tenants, medical office tenants bring certain environmental risks. For example, you can expect the space to become contaminated during the lease, when the medical office tenant starts generating hazardous materials and medical waste.

As a commercial property owner, one of your primary responsibilities to your tenants is to maintain safety on the premises. Depending on the type of property you own, your tenants may use or generate hazardous materials in their spaces. Tenants as diverse as dry cleaners, photo processors, printers, and nail salons work with potentially hazardous materials. If those hazardous materials leak into your uncontaminated building or center, you could face some serious problems.

By virtue of a legal concept called “indemnity,” a commercial property owner sometimes can make its tenant financially responsible for damages the owner suffers as the result of any party's actions. Owners generally try to secure their right to this kind of reimbursement by including an indemnity provision in their leases.

Employees of an office building tenant in Maryland are currently suing the building's owner, claiming that they are suffering the effects of poor air quality caused by “sick building syndrome” [Montgomery Mutual Insurance Co. v. Josephine Chesson, May 2007].

If you're like most shopping center owners, you're always looking for an innovative way to earn additional revenue at your center, boost traffic, increase the tenant mix, create excitement, and drum up positive publicity for your center. You can achieve all of those goals by letting a business use a portion of your outdoor parking lot for any one of a variety of business-related activities, such as boat sales, book sales, car sales, Christmas tree sales, firewor...

Almost all leases require commercial property owners to approve the contractors that will be making improvements on the property that owners lease to tenants. Most people who deal in commercial property consider the provision necessary to protect the owner; without it, a tenant could hire an incompetent contractor, resulting in damage to the owner's property.