If you own office building or retail space you’re probably very reluctant to give a termination right to your tenants in their leases. You run the risk of losing a large amount of money; allowing a tenant to get out of its lease early can render costly improvements and other expensive...
Q: The standard lease form that my attorney and I have used for the last several years requires a tenant to add me to its commercial general liability (CGL) policy as an “additional named insured.” But recently I have spoken with...
Before retaining a real estate attorney for a new deal, don’t spend time and money disclosing the deal’s details to her before you are sure that no conflict of interest exists that could prevent her from fairly representing your interests. This applies whether the attorney is new to...
If your commercial property has more than one level, it will have at least one set of stairs. You may be wondering if you could include the stairs leading to, say, the dance studio in the square footage, and whether it’s customary, or even legal, to include stairs leading to a second-story...
A new lawsuit raises the question of whether an office building tenant should get to choose whether to use union contractors for its space, or whether the decision should be left up to the building’s manager.
The federal lawsuit filed against real estate giant Jones Lang LaSalle by...
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...
Gross sales clauses can be very lucrative for owners because they aren’t limited to collecting just base rent—the percentage of sales a tenant must hand over could potentially be more than its actual rent. But a problem crops up for you when other tenants use the named tenant’s...
So much retail business is done online that it’s common for tenants that are pulling in profits that way to use their brick-and-mortar spaces for purposes related to the business, but not to actually sell products. For example, a tenant with a successful website might turn its store into a...
If you grant a license to kiosks and carts to conduct business at your center, make sure that you audit the books and records of a set percentage of those kiosks and carts each year to verify their gross sales. It’s not uncommon for kiosks and carts to submit gross sales statements that...
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....
During the economic downturn several years ago, contraction options—which let tenants give back part of their space during their leases and pay a lower rent—became popular because downsizing was one way for tenants in trouble to scale back costs. But two now-common commercial real...
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...
