Adam Bothun 
Parking rarely makes the headline terms of a lease negotiation, but it shapes the daily experience of every tenant, employee, and customer who uses the property. A medical office without convenient patient parking loses appointments. A restaurant without enough evening spaces loses covers. An office tenant whose employees circle the lot every morning loses morale. … Read more
When tenants tour a commercial space, they look at the offices, the showroom, or the sales floor. What they often forget to evaluate is storage: the basement cage, the back room, the fenced yard where inventory, records, equipment, and seasonal stock actually live. Storage space is rarely glamorous, but running out of it disrupts operations … Read more
In an industrial lease, the loading dock is where the business actually happens. Trucks back in, goods move in and out, and the rhythm of receiving and shipping sets the pace of the entire operation. Yet many industrial leases describe the docks in a single line, as if a dock door were interchangeable with any … Read more
Every modern office runs on connectivity. Fiber lines, backup circuits, wireless access points, and building wide networks are as essential to a tenant as electricity and water. Yet many office leases treat telecommunications as an afterthought, with a single sentence about phone service buried in the services exhibit. When a tenant discovers it cannot bring … Read more
Look up at almost any office building, apartment tower, or retail center in an American city and you will see more than a roof. Satellite dishes, cellular antennas, HVAC units, and solar panels all compete for the same square footage. That space has real commercial value, and the question of who controls it comes up … Read more
Open the utility closet in any apartment building and you will find the equipment that decides how tenants pay for electricity, water, and gas. In some buildings, each unit has its own meter owned by the utility company, and tenants pay the utility directly. In others, the landlord installs private submeters behind a single master … Read more
When the county assessor values your landlord’s building too high, your rent goes up. That is the quiet math of property tax pass-throughs: inflated assessments become inflated operating expenses, and tenants pay their share. Most tenants accept the tax bill as a fact of life. Sophisticated tenants know that assessments can be appealed, and that … Read more
Your commercial lease quotes a base rent, but the number on the first page is rarely the number you actually pay. For many tenants, property taxes passed through by the landlord add a significant surcharge on top of base rent, one that can rise unpredictably when the tax assessor revalues the building. Understanding how property … Read more
A leaking roof can destroy inventory, close a business, and trigger a fight over tens of thousands of dollars in repairs. Structural problems, a cracked foundation, a failing load-bearing wall, a compromised roof deck, raise the stakes further, because they implicate the safety of the entire building. When these big-ticket failures occur, the first question … Read more
When the air conditioning dies in August or the furnace gives out in January, the first argument is about comfort. The second argument, and the more expensive one, is about money: who pays to repair or replace the HVAC system. In residential rentals the answer is usually the landlord. In commercial leases it depends on … Read more