8 Tips For Negotiating a Retail Lease

Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

What are the top things that you should be aware of when negotiating a retail lease? Bethany Babcock, Founder and Principal at Foresite Commercial Real Estate, reviews some major points for landlords to negotiate with their prospective tenants, large and small.

Read this entire interview here: http://tinyurl.com/y8cppmt8

You represent both tenants and landlords, what are the main things we should be aware of when negotiating a lease, especially from a landlord's perspective?

1. Fixed renewal options: in this world where now we're seeing rental rates increase dramatically, especially on retail properties in our area, when you're putting fixed renewal options, which give a tenant the right to renew at a specific price in the future, it's equivalent to putting a cap on the owner’s value. That's important because if the owner wants to sell or do anything, that's the cap, it doesn't get much better than that, so at that point, the value of their property is going to go up and down, subject to the market and the cap rates, but it's not going to go up and down based on rent anymore. That's a bigger ask that I think most tenants realize. A lot of times they'll ask for a five-year lease and then they'll want 20 years’ worth of rent options, that's never a good deal for the landlord.

2. Free rent upfront versus lower overall base rent:how to maximize the value of the lease? It's really important if a tenant is saying, I need to be at $20 a square foot, and you're thinking, that's tough, I don't think I can make that work, it's not working on my pro forma. One of the better ways to do that and still be able to maximize the value is to tell the tenant, I can't give you $20/square foot, what if I gave you a year's worth of free rent, and the first year is at zero, and then your effective rent over the period will be about $20/sf. But in year two, or year three, it'll be $23/square foot. What that does for the landlord is that when you're capping the value of the property, you're doing it after the free rent period, and they get the benefit of the higher rent, whereas the tenant still gets the same effective rent. That's one way to get a win-win scenario for both parties.

3. Buying up the rent to get more TI: Once you go over market rents, it doesn't help anybody. A really good example of this is Starbucks, back in 2006-2007, when they were expanding fast, they were buying up the rent high by getting a ton of TI and having their buildings just delivered to them. But in 2008, when the market adjusted, suddenly you had all of these little Starbucks that were closing, and the rents they were paying at that time were $50 a foot, and now it's even much higher. They couldn't replace or backfill those locations, even though it was a good real estate with those same rents and so a lot of landlords were in hardship. It matters because it's going to affect the value of their property.

4. HVAC and plumbing: If you're on the landlord side, make sure that it's a one-time event, or that it has an end date because if those issues go on indefinitely, that means every buyer or lender that underwrites that property is going to have to underwrite that possible event. If you have an end date, within one year or two years, they can put it in and once that period has passed, that risk subsides. But if it's ongoing, then it's going to diminish the value of the building, because it has to get underwritten each year, or conservatively, every few years, however often they think it might occur.

Bethany Babcock

www.foresitecre.com

www.twitter.com/bethanyjbabcock