The owner of commercial property comprised of two buildings with an adjoining lobby hires a brokerage firm to find a tenant for the space. The broker lines up a tenant. The lease runs five years and requires the “Owner” to pay the broker’s commission for the...
What Happened: Another retail tenant has failed in its bid to use COVID-19 as an excuse for not paying rent. The tenant in this case was a New York City outlet of national retail chain The Gap, which claimed, among other things, that the pandemic and its resulting shutdowns...
Q: Is there any benefit to letting a local charitable or nonprofit organization temporarily use vacant space in a center to collect donations, sell or distribute merchandise, or give out information about their programs?
What Happened: Like so many tenants affected by COVID-19, Saks Fifth Avenue stopped paying rent at its flagship New York City store. The landlord sued Saks’ parent company, the lease guarantor, for $2.7 million in unpaid rent. If these were normal times, we’d be...
Renting office space to a corporate tenant requires some special handling of the typical assignment clause in a lease. Usually, an assignment clause requires the owner’s consent before the tenant may assign the lease. A corporate tenant may try to get around this by simply transferring...
With most office workers able to work from home, the pandemic hasn’t hit office tenants—and thus their landlords—as hard as it’s hit tenants in the retail, restaurant, and hospitality sectors. But with employees productive at home, office tenants are reconsidering their...
In their eagerness to get the lease signed, brokers may be inclined to make statements about what the document says (or doesn’t say) to allay the concerns of one of the parties. So, what happens if the landlord or tenant takes the broker at its word and signs the lease, only to discover...
Liquidated damages clauses can be a convenient way to incentivize performance and avoid disputes over the price tag of breaches. One common use of such clauses is to require the tenant to pay predetermined rent increases in the event it violates a covenant not to open a competing business within...
On June 2, Commercial Lease Law Insider received the First Place Award for Best Business Newsletter, presented by the Specialized Information Publisher’s Association at its annual conference.
The judges based their decision on 2019 issues in which our editor explained...
While each lease is different, COVID-19 generally doesn’t excuse tenants’ duty to pay rent. But, in times of pandemic, having the lease on your side may not count for much. The simple fact is that for many landlords, strict enforcement of lease rent obligations is not a realistic...
