The published timeline for a commercial building permit review is a mean of 22.9 days and a median of 14, across 741 cities surveyed this year. For a commercial project, the realistic total is 2 to 4 times that once resubmittals are counted, because most commercial applications draw correction comments and go through two or three review cycles before they clear.[1] A landlord who wrote “premises delivered within 60 days” into a lease before checking the local permit office’s actual pace has written a promise the jurisdiction may not let it keep — and a federal court in Florida has now shown what happens to the lease itself when that promise breaks badly enough.
A tenant whose landlord blows the delivery date usually has one contractual exit: terminate, get the deposit back, walk. A Tampa federal court gave this tenant something larger. Rescission treats the lease as if it never existed, and it orders back every dollar the tenant ever paid under it — deposit, prepaid rent, out-of-pocket costs, all of it.
The lease priced the delay at 60 days, and the landlord kept missing it anyway. Advanced Care Pediatrics signed a lease in May 2024 for space in New Port Richey, Florida, meant to become a pediatric extended care facility. The landlord, DPS PR Realty, was contractually obligated to complete a defined scope of “Landlord’s Work” — including a fenced-in playground and specific equipment installation — and hand over the finished space within 60 days, by July 30, 2024.[2] July came and went. So did the rest of 2024.
The landlord kept promising completion, and the tenant kept believing it, until a walkthrough proved otherwise. By December 23, 2024, Advanced Care warned DPS PR that it might rescind. Three days later, it learned the landlord had misrepresented its progress for months. A January 6, 2025 walkthrough — attended by Advanced Care’s regional director, a DPS PR employee, and government officials — found that the completed work didn’t match the submitted plans and wasn’t code compliant.[2] Without compliant, finished space, Advanced Care could not obtain the licensure it needed to operate a pediatric facility at all. That is not a delay a tenant can staff around; it is a business that legally cannot open.
Rescission has six elements under Florida law, and the landlord’s own conduct proved most of them for free. A rescission claim requires: contractual privity, a valid contract, a ground for rescission (fraud, mutual mistake, misrepresentation, or impossibility of performance), notice of rescission, an ability to restore both sides to their pre-contract position, and no adequate remedy at law.[3] DPS PR’s own broken promises supplied the third element — misrepresentation and impossibility of performance both applied, since the landlord had told Advanced Care for months that work was progressing when it wasn’t. Advanced Care had never occupied the space, which made restoring the status quo trivial: nothing had to be undone except returning money. And because the failed buildout blocked Advanced Care from ever operating and generating the revenue the lease was written around, the court found ordinary damages “impossible to determine” — which is exactly the gap rescission exists to fill.[3]
DPS PR raised four defenses, and the record undercut each one. It argued it had “substantially complied” and could finish within two weeks — a claim with no support in the record, and undercut by its own CEO’s sworn statement that no plans had even been approved. It argued the tenant had already taken possession, which the same declaration flatly contradicted: Advanced Care never occupied the space. It raised failure to satisfy conditions precedent without pleading which conditions or how, which failed on procedure alone. And it argued impossibility of performance as a defense against rescission, when impossibility of performance is one of the recognized grounds for rescission under the same case law the court cited.[3]
The result was a full unwind, not a negotiated exit. On September 3, 2025, the court granted summary judgment for Advanced Care. On September 18, it entered judgment for $83,023.15 — every dollar Advanced Care had paid under the lease, including the security deposit and prepaid rent — and declared the lease rescinded.[4] DPS PR never filed a response to the damages calculation, and the case closed the same day.
Why the stakes here are rising, not falling, in 2026. A landlord’s incentive to write an aggressive delivery date has not changed; what’s changed is how often the jurisdiction can actually hit it. PermitPlace’s 2026 survey found commercial permitting carrying costs running roughly $500 a day once a project slips, and modeled a retailer opening 20 sites a year losing $780,000 annually just from the gap between a fast-permitting city and a slow one.[1] Every one of those days is a day a “Landlord’s Work” clause with a fixed delivery date is quietly exposed, whether or not anyone renegotiates it before signing.
Rescission is worth understanding separately from a work letter’s cost-overrun allocation or a negotiated termination buyout clause, because both of those are terms the parties actually wrote down. Nothing in the Advanced Care lease promised a full refund if delivery failed. Frustration of purpose is a common-law doctrine, not a clause, and the court applied it anyway.
Knowing how exposed a delivery date actually is before it’s missed#
A “Landlord’s Work” schedule with a fixed delivery date reads the same in every lease until the local permit office decides otherwise. Acrebase extracts delivery obligations, cure periods, and remedy language from every lease in a portfolio, and flags which deals carry a delivery date without an extension mechanism for permitting or force majeure — the gap that, left unaddressed, is exactly what let a Florida court treat one lease as if it had never been signed.
It also applies a firm’s approved clause library automatically, so a landlord’s standard delivery-date extension language, or a tenant’s standard notice-and-cure sequence before rescission becomes the only option, gets proposed consistently across every deal a team negotiates, rather than depending on which associate drafted which version last.
If you are a tenant, document every delivery promise in writing and treat a pattern of missed dates as a reason to inspect, not just to wait — a landlord’s own misrepresentations about progress are themselves a rescission ground, independent of the delay itself. If you are a landlord, a delivery date without a permitting-delay extension clause is a date you are personally guaranteeing against a process you don’t control, and courts have shown they will hold you to it in full.
Footnotes
[1] PermitPlace, “2026 State of Building Permits Across America” (March 2026) — surveying 741 cities across 44 states; national mean initial permit review time of 22.9 days, median of 14 days; commercial projects typically require 2-3 resubmittal cycles, pushing realistic total permit duration to 2-4x the published timeline; delays estimated to cost roughly $500/day in carrying costs, modeled at $780,000 annually for a retailer opening 20 locations a year across a 14-day city versus a 92-day city. https://permitplace.com/state-of-building-permits-2026/
[2] Advanced Care Pediatrics of Florida, LLC v. DPS PR Realty, Inc., No. 8:25-cv-653-KKM-CPT (M.D. Fla. Sept. 3, 2025) (order granting summary judgment) — background facts on the May 2024 lease, the “Landlord’s Work” requirements, the July 30, 2024 delivery deadline, and the timeline of misrepresentations and the January 6, 2025 walkthrough. https://ecf.flmd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2025-00653-52-8-cv=
[3] Advanced Care Pediatrics of Florida, LLC v. DPS PR Realty, Inc., No. 8:25-cv-653-KKM-CPT (M.D. Fla. Sept. 3, 2025) (order granting summary judgment) — applying the six-element rescission standard under Longo v. Campus Advantage, Inc., 588 F. Supp. 3d 1286 (M.D. Fla. 2022), and Crown Ice Mach. Leasing Co. v. Sam Senter Farms, Inc., 174 So. 2d 614 (Fla. 2d DCA 1965); rejecting all four of DPS PR’s affirmative defenses. https://ecf.flmd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2025-00653-52-8-cv=
[4] Advanced Care Pediatrics of Florida, LLC v. DPS PR Realty, Inc., No. 8:25-cv-653-KKM-CPT (M.D. Fla. Sept. 18, 2025) (final judgment) — entering judgment of $83,023.15 for Advanced Care and declaring the lease rescinded, after DPS PR failed to respond to the damages calculation. https://ecf.flmd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2025-00653-54-8-cv=
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.