When you think about settling a dispute with a tenant without going to court, arbitration as an alternate dispute resolution method might immediately come to mind. That’s because arbitration is widely known and talked about in commercial real estate. But before you pursue arbitration,...
Owning a large retail or office building property can be lucrative. After all, if the rent rate is based on the square footage that a tenant rents, a vast space has the potential to pull in more money than a small one. But profiting from the sheer size of your property isn’t a given. To...
Mixed-use properties have become ubiquitous in most areas of the country. Often, they make the most of a property’s layout, especially in tight urban neighborhoods—providing easy-to-access commercial space on a first floor and residential units on the floors above so no space is...
The goal when leasing to tenants at your center—and especially those that pay percentage rent—is to pick businesses that draw the most customers. If a product or service is a “favorite” of a customer, there’ll be repeat business. For this reason, leases with...
With the failure rate of new restaurants hovering around 59 percent in the first three years of opening, it’s not surprising that restaurant owners are trying to come up with a hook—a theme, a specific type of ambiance, or discounts for certain groups or time periods in the day or...
At first, a guaranty from a tenant that you’re unsure about seems like a great safety net. Another party will take over the tenant’s lease obligations if it fails to do so itself, so you won’t be left on the hook trying to mitigate the financial or other damage. In isolation, a...
In theory, a sublet seems easy: When you let a tenant sublet its space, the subtenant pays the tenant its rent due under the sublease, and the tenant pays you its rent or percentage rent due under the lease. While that’s the way sublet scenarios are designed and expected to work, you can...
A tenant’s lease violation is never good news for commercial real estate owners, but each type of violation has different consequences—ranging from annoying to disastrous. If your lease doesn’t give you a “self-help” right, you might find yourself facing the...
It’s an undertaking for any tenant to scout out prospective commercial space, negotiate a lease, and then deal with the logistics and expense of moving into that space. So, after going through all of the effort to get established at a property, it’s not unusual for a big tenant that...
If you own commercial property and are contemplating branching out and acquiring more properties, you might not know where to start. A good jumping off point is understanding what type of leasing opportunities are available—and their interplay with the commercial real estate market now....
Every lease gives an owner certain remedies, such as eviction or the collection of damages, that the owner can use if something the tenant does or fails to do fits the lease’s definition of an “event of default.” But what if your lease doesn’t clearly define what acts or...
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...
