Saks Global filed for Chapter 11 and is closing 57 Saks Off 5th locations and eight Saks Fifth Avenue stores. Eddie Bauer is closing all roughly 400 of its stores. Claire’s filed for bankruptcy for the second time in seven years. At Home increased its store-closure count from 26 to 32 after filing in June.[1] None of those four companies has to share a lease, a landlord, or even a property type for their exits to matter to a fifth, unrelated tenant three doors down—because the lease that tenant signed almost certainly contains a co-tenancy clause, and that clause does not care whose bankruptcy caused the vacancy.
Most co-tenancy clauses get filed away as boilerplate the day the lease is signed, on the theory that a named anchor going dark is a remote, hypothetical event. 2026 is the year that stopped being hypothetical for a large share of retail tenants, and the clause that was never expected to matter is now the one deciding whether rent gets cut, converted, or walked away from entirely.
A co-tenancy clause is not one trigger. It is a trigger, a remedy, and a cure period, negotiated as three separate questions.
The trigger: named anchor, or occupancy threshold. An opening co-tenancy condition applies before the tenant ever opens for business, tying the obligation to open—or to pay full rent once open—to specific co-tenants or a minimum occupancy level being in place at delivery.[2] An ongoing co-tenancy condition applies for the rest of the term and typically fires one of two ways: a named-anchor trigger, which lists specific tenants by name and activates the moment one of them stops operating, or an occupancy-threshold trigger, which activates when total center occupancy falls below an agreed floor, commonly 70% to 80% of gross leasable area.[3] Anchors are not interchangeable line items in this calculation—a single anchor can drive 60% to 80% of a center’s total customer visits and sales, which is exactly why losing one is treated as a structural event rather than an ordinary vacancy.[2]
The remedy: a waterfall, not a switch. A well-drafted clause does not jump straight from full rent to lease termination. It stages relief: rent commonly abates 25% to 50% once the cure period expires, sometimes converting the tenant to percentage-rent-only—typically 4% to 6% of gross sales—in place of fixed minimum rent, for as long as the violation continues.[4] Termination is the last rung, not the first, and it is almost always gated behind a materially longer runway than the rent-relief remedies that precede it.
The cure period: the landlord’s clock, and the tenant’s actual exposure window. Cure periods are what separate rent relief from a walk-away right, and they are staggered on purpose: 60 to 90 days is typical before a rent-reduction remedy activates, while termination rights commonly require the violation to persist 180 days to a full year before the tenant can exercise them.[3] A landlord who backfills the anchor space with even a temporary or lesser-quality replacement within that window can reset the clock entirely—a fact that is in the lease’s definitions section, not its remedies section, and is easy to miss when reading the clause the first time.
Why the gap between what a tenant assumes and what the clause says is usually the expensive part.
Tenants frequently assume a co-tenancy clause protects them against “the center doing badly.” It does not. It protects them against the specific, narrowly defined event the clause describes—a named anchor closing, or occupancy crossing a specific numerical line—and nothing else. A center that loses six mid-size tenants representing 35% of its foot traffic but stays above an 80% occupancy-by-square-footage threshold because two big-box anchors remain open has not tripped a typical occupancy-based clause at all, even though the shopping experience the tenant negotiated for is gone. Reading the trigger definition literally, against the actual rent roll, is the only way to know whether a given closure helps.
Why this is a portfolio question for landlords, not a single-lease question.
A shopping center owner does not have one co-tenancy clause to track—a mid-size center can carry dozens of them, each with a different named anchor, a different occupancy threshold, and a different cure period, and a single anchor bankruptcy can trip several at once. Knowing which leases are keyed to which anchor, and how much rent relief the center is exposed to the day that anchor’s store goes dark, is the same structural problem as reading forty termination clauses at once to find which ones a company can exit cheapest—a set of provisions that look identical in form and are never actually compared against each other until the triggering event has already happened.
Knowing which leases are wired to which anchor before it closes#
Answering if this anchor closes, which of our leases trip a co-tenancy remedy, and how much rent exposure does that create by reopening every lease in a portfolio the week a bankruptcy is announced is exactly the kind of work Acrebase is built to remove. Acrebase is AI-powered contract intelligence for commercial real estate: it parses leases into structured data, flags co-tenancy triggers and the anchors they are keyed to, and lets you query an entire portfolio in plain language—which leases name a given anchor, what occupancy threshold each ongoing clause uses, what cure period applies before each remedy activates, and what the resulting rent exposure is across the portfolio—with every answer traced back to the exact clause in the source lease.
Acrebase also maintains a firm’s approved clause library and negotiation playbook, so a landlord’s fallback position on occupancy thresholds and cure periods—or a retail tenant’s standard ask for a rent-abatement floor and a realistic remedy waterfall—stays consistent across every lease a team negotiates, rather than depending on which associate handled which renewal. Its AI, trained on prior negotiations, can flag when an incoming draft’s co-tenancy language is more aggressive or less protective than what the firm has accepted elsewhere, before it gets initialed into a new lease.
The practical takeaway: if you are a retail tenant, confirm whether your co-tenancy clause is trigger by name or by occupancy threshold, and check that against the actual anchors in your center today, not the ones there when you signed. If you are a landlord, know which leases across your portfolio are keyed to which anchors before the next bankruptcy filing tells you, because the backfill window that resets the cure period is short, and it starts running the day the anchor goes dark, not the day you notice.
Footnotes
[1] MoneyTalksNews and RetailOasis, running trackers of 2026 retail bankruptcy filings and store closures (Saks Global Chapter 11 with 57 Saks Off 5th and eight Saks Fifth Avenue closures; Eddie Bauer closing approximately 400 stores; Claire’s second Chapter 11 filing in seven years; At Home increasing closures from 26 to 32 stores after its June filing). https://www.moneytalksnews.com/retailers-that-are-closing-stores-in-including-grocery-stores/ and https://www.retailoasis.com/retail-blog/retail-bankruptcies-administrations-store-closures-2026
[2] Occupier, “What is a Co-Tenancy Clause?” (opening versus ongoing co-tenancy conditions; anchor tenants driving 60-80% of a center’s total customer visits and sales). https://www.occupier.com/blog/what-is-co-tenancy
[3] GrowthFactor, “Co-Tenancy Clauses in Retail Leases (2026)” (named-anchor versus occupancy-threshold triggers; occupancy floors commonly set at 70-80% of gross leasable area; cure periods of 60-90 days for rent remedies versus 180 days to a year for termination rights). https://www.growthfactor.ai/resources/blog/co-tenancy-clauses
[4] CRE Vertical, “Co-Tenancy Clauses: The Lease Provision That Can Multiply the Impact of Vacancy” (staged remedy structure: rent abatement of 25-50%, conversion to percentage-rent-only in the 4-6% of gross sales range, and termination as the final-stage remedy). https://www.crevertical.com/stratcre/co-tenancy-clauses-the-lease-provision-that-can-multiply-the-impact-of-vacancy
Acrebase is AI-powered contract intelligence for commercial real estate — clause extraction, risk flagging, and portfolio-wide search, plus tools for maintaining a consistent clause library and negotiation playbook across every deal a team runs. Learn more at acrebase.com, or get in touch about pricing.