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Spring is approaching, but owners should still stay on top of ice removal responsibilities in common areas of commercial properties. It’s important to spell out who’s responsible for ice removal in front of tenant’s stores—you or the tenant. You might wonder whether if your leases make you responsible for plowing and shoveling common areas of the center, does that mean tenants won’t have any liability for accidents that occur right outside ...

Many owners negotiate a recapture right in their leases that they can exercise if a tenant intends to assign its lease or sublet all or part of its space. And this could include a profit-sharing clause that will require the tenant to pay all or part of any profit it makes from an assignment or a sublet if you decide not to recapture the space.

The ability to turn a profit by selling products online has in recent years drastically reduced some business’s need for physical space, but commercial real estate leases tend to have terms that span several years, and sometimes decades, so a tenant could’ve signed a 20-year lease at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy. New tenants want to have the option of getting rid of some of their space if online sales soar and they don’t have a nee...

If, like many shopping center owners, you provide off-site traffic improvements for your tenants, you should make sure that you’re compensated for that. After all, these improvements—for example, special signage and lighting in areas leading to the property or a way to control the flow of vehicles into and out of the center—benefit both owners and tenants by helping increase customer traffic, boost sales, and reduce the risk of accidents.

If a tenant isn’t in compliance with its lease terms because it’s waiting for certain items or obligations that take time, don’t automatically jump to a lawsuit. The cure period you’ve allowed the tenant to become compliant might not be realistic if the requirements it’s trying to secure take longer than that.

A New York landlord found out the hard way that because the tenant was in the lengthy process of complying with the lease, but...

Setting a workable commencement date for a lease to begin is one of the most important aspects of lease negotiations. But it often isn’t thought through by either owners or tenants. As with many overlooked parts of a lease deal, it takes a back seat to big ticket items like cotenancy clauses, renewal options, and use provisions. However, so many things depend on when the lease begins, you need to make an informed decision about how you should set a lease commencem...

Occasionally, a CRE landlord will choose to be in a joint venture with a tenant, but it’s not typical. Unfortunately, under certain circumstances, someone could try to argue that you are in a joint venture in order to hold you liable for an event or accident. So consider whether you’re inadvertently meeting the joint venture criteria and adjust accordingly if you don’t want to be on the hook for the situation that recently threatened a Mississippi land...

Pennsylvania commercial real estate owners and tenants are both about to the feel the impact of the Keystone State’s recent decision to legalize medical marijuana. That’s because dispensaries will be looking for space in shopping centers, which could be lucrative for owners whose properties have all the right characteristics for that type of business; it could be a terrifying proposition for a tenant whose business nature is at odds with marijuana sales, eve...

Your shopping center leases probably require each tenant to pay its share of the center’s fire insurance, liability insurance, and other kinds of insurance. However, if you want to pass through your insurance costs to your tenants as a separate component of common area maintenance (CAM) costs solely by using a standard formula based on “gross leasable area,” it could leave you on the hook for costs you thought would be paid by your tenants.

While many commercial leases are for several-year terms, it might behoove you to agree to a month-to-month tenancy with a tenant. Month-to-month tenants can be part of a strategic plan for your property, especially if you have spaces that you’d like to collect rent for in the short term while looking for longer term tenants. If you rent a space on a month-to-month basis to a tenant without a lease, don’t take termination of the tenancy less seriously than yo...