Before signing a lease with you, a savvy prospective retail tenant may independently investigate your center's business operations, rather than relying solely on what you say about them. Therefore, the tenant should have only itself to blame if its store fails.

Your lease may make a tenant responsible for doing all interior maintenance work at its space, while you're responsible for doing all exterior maintenance work. Although you may think that distinguishing between the interior and exterior of the tenant's space is a snap, think again. Certain elements of a tenant's space can have both interior and exterior characteristics. For example, windows and automatic glass sliding doors at entrances and exits may face b...

You may agree to give a tenant the right to use a set number of parking spaces at your building or center in return for a parking fee. But if your lease is like many we've seen, it may have a loophole that could result in a tenant paying you far less in parking fees than you expected. Here's the loophole: The lease doesn't address whether a tenant must pay for all of its parking spaces when it isn't using all of them.

To entice a desirable tenant to sign your lease, you may be forced to give it a security deposit concession. The concession may be to forgo a deposit altogether or to have the tenant put up less money than you'd typically require in a stronger leasing market. Either way, a security deposit concession is a special perk that you wouldn't want to give to just any tenant—especially not to one that becomes undeserving or a deadbeat.