Online Alerts

RSS

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—...

Q: I’ve had some minor but time-consuming lease issues with a tenant at my shopping center, but its store is important to the overall center’s plan. It doesn’t have a renewal option but I am considering renewing its lease nonetheless. Is there any way to protect myself when doing this?

Occasionally, a tenant that is displeased with something at the space it leases will ask a court for declaratory relief. This is a judgment from a court declaring something about the lease provisions, such as who is responsible for a certain thing if the tenant and owner are disputing responsibility. But you can avoid a trip to court in some cases by negotiating with the tenant for it to waive its right to ask a court for declaratory relief on one or more lease terms.

On June 6, Commercial Lease Law Insider was recognized in the Best Business Newsletter category of awards presented by the Specialized Information Publisher’s Association (SIPA) at its annual conference in Washington, D.C. The judges based their decisions on 2017 issues in which editor Elizabeth Purcell explained:

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.

Most shopping center and strip mall owners are always looking for ways to bring in more income. If you’re negotiating leases with some prospective tenants to fill vacant space and they’ll be paying percentage rent and base rent, there are often-overlooked ways to boost your rent revenues that you should try to put in the lease.

If you’ve ever experienced a situation where a tenant has vacated its space, you might have been tempted to make use of that portion of your property while you pursue claims against the tenant for breaching its lease. But that could be a big mistake. A tenant could allege, and a court could agree, that by using the space for your benefit you’ve lost your chance to pursue your claims against the tenant that would allow you to collect monetary damages. A recen...

Tenants often seek financing to help them run their businesses, so you have probably gotten numerous requests from tenants for a “landlord’s lien waiver.” Without the lien waiver, a tenant’s lender may refuse to go through with the loan, or an equipment lessor may refuse to lease expensive equipment to the tenant. A lien waiver typically states that you agree to waive a valuable right—that is, the right to take possession of the tenant&rsqu...

Like many owners, you may have certain tenants that commit the same lease violation over and over. But they always cure—that is, correct—the violation before it becomes a lease default. For instance, they repeatedly pay their rent late each month.

If the office building you own has multiple common areas and some meeting spaces that are reserved specifically for certain tenants that are usually available for use, they are likely a selling point for some tenants. But if the building is undergoing work to update and refresh those spaces while you’re negotiating leases with several tenants, you might be concerned that if the work continues past the point where they expect to be able to start using these spaces,...