Section 50 of Cvent’s deed of lease at Solutions Plaza is the last thing in the document. After it there is nothing but a bracketed line reading “[Signatures on following page.]” and four pages of limited liability company signature blocks. It is the clause that lets the tenant give space back.
Section 41, nine pages earlier, is the clause that makes the tenant take space it has not asked for.[1][2]
Both were signed on 23 October 2013 by TMG Solutions Plaza 1, 2 and 3, L.L.C. and Cvent, Inc., covering three towers at 1710, 1709 and 1707 SAIC Drive in McLean, Virginia. The term was eleven lease years from a commencement date “anticipated to be August 1, 2014.” The initial premises came to roughly 103,340 square feet spread across seven separate blocks: the seventh and eighth floors of Tower 1, the sixth, seventh and eighth of Tower 2, and the seventh and eighth of Tower 3.[3]
Then Section 41 adds two more blocks whether anyone wants them or not:
“Landlord shall lease to Tenant, and Tenant shall lease from Landlord, approximately 21,528 rentable square feet of area located on the sixth (6) floor of Tower 1, and approximately 4,138 rentable square feet of area located on the sixth (6th) floor of Tower 3, which areas are more particularly depicted on Exhibit “A” hereto (the “Must Take Premises”) upon the following terms and conditions: (i) the rent commencement date of the Lease with respect to the Must Take Premises shall be the earlier to occur of the date that is the first day of the twenty-fifth (25th) full calendar months following the Commencement Date, or the date Tenant commences to use the applicable portion of the Must Take Premises for office purposes…”
Read clause (i) again for what is missing from it. There is no condition. The rent commencement date for 25,666 square feet is a calendar date computed off the commencement date, or an earlier date if the tenant moves in sooner, and that is the whole trigger. Nothing about delivery. Nothing about substantial completion, or a certificate of occupancy, or the tenant’s acceptance, or a landlord delay that pushes the date out. Clause (v) says the tenant “shall lease the Must Take Premises from Landlord in its as is condition.”
That is what a must-take obligation is. Not an option the tenant may exercise, and not a right of first offer the tenant may decline. A second lease, inside the first one, that signs itself on a date already written down.
Sixth floor, Tower 1#
Here is the part that makes this document worth reading twice rather than once.
Section 50 gives Cvent the right to “give back to Landlord, as of July 31, 2020 or July 31, 2022 (each a ‘Early Contraction Date’), up to the equivalent of one full floor in Tower 1 and one full floor in Tower 2, in increments of no less than all the space leased by Tenant on a floor.” The space handed back has to be “the uppermost and/or the lowermost portion of the Demised Premises so that Tenant’s remaining Demised Premises remains contiguous space."[2]
Work out which floors that leaves. Before the must-take, Cvent holds floors 7 and 8 of Tower 1. After it, floors 6, 7 and 8. The lowermost floor of Tower 1 is therefore the sixth, which is the must-take floor. The contraction right and the must-take obligation point at the same 21,528 square feet.
So the lease does contemplate the tenant giving back exactly the space the lease forced it to take. The sequence is the problem. The must-take rent commences on the first day of the twenty-fifth full calendar month after commencement, which on the anticipated 1 August 2014 start is 1 September 2016, inside lease year three. The first Early Contraction Date is 31 July 2020, the last day of lease year six.
Between those two dates the tenant pays full rent on that floor for forty-seven months. The rent table in the fundamental lease provisions runs $29.42 per square foot in year three, $30.16 in year four, $30.91 in year five and $31.68 in year six, escalating 2.50% a year. On 21,528 square feet that is about $2.58 million, of which the last twelve months alone are $682,007.[4]
None of which is a drafting mistake. A landlord that signs an eleven-year lease and funds a $70.00 per square foot construction allowance is entitled to want the big-premises years early and the flexibility late. Cvent’s lawyers got a contraction right into a 2013 office lease at all, which was not nothing. The point is narrower: the existence of the right tells you very little, and the dates in it tell you almost everything.
The fee is due a year before the space is#
Section 50 makes the contraction effective “only so long as” two things happen. The tenant gives notice “not later than twelve (12) full months prior to July 31, 2020, or July 31, 2022 (each a ‘Contraction Notice Date’)”, and:
“(b) on or before the Contraction Notice Date, Tenant pays to Landlord, in immediately available Federal funds, the ‘Contraction Fee’ (as hereinafter defined).”
On or before the Contraction Notice Date. Not on the Early Contraction Date, when the space actually goes back. The tenant wires the entire buyout on 31 July 2019 and then keeps paying rent on the bought-out floor until 31 July 2020. At the year six rate that is another $56,834 a month, twelve times, on space it has already paid to be rid of.
The fee itself is the unamortized transaction costs for the contraction premises, “including, without limitation, the brokerage fees and commissions, free rent, and fifty percent (50%) of the Construction Allowance,” amortized “[using an interest rate of eight percent (8%)] in equal monthly installments over the initial term.” The square brackets are in the filed executed document. So is a bracketed “[i.e., 2.50% per year]” in Section 41. Somebody’s negotiation draft went out the door with the annotations still in it, which is a small thing, and also the kind of small thing that becomes an argument about whether 8% was ever agreed.
Take just the allowance component to see the order of magnitude. Seventy dollars a square foot on the Tower 1 floor is $1,506,960, half of that is $753,480, and level-amortizing that at 8% over the 132-month initial term leaves roughly $424,000 outstanding with sixty months to run, or about $19.70 per square foot. That is before commissions and before free rent, both of which Section 50 adds and neither of which the filed lease quantifies.[4]
aQuantive’s building does the same thing with a stipulated number instead of a formula. A First Amendment dated 15 April 2004 between Chicago Fulton Venture, L.L.C. and SBI Group, Inc., amending a 20 July 1999 lease at 600 West Fulton Street in Chicago, sets the contraction fee at “the unamortized costs and expenses incurred by Landlord in connection with the Contraction Space (Landlord and Tenant acknowledge and agree that such costs and expenses equals $49.76 per rentable square feet of the Contraction Space) amortized over the period commencing June 1, 2004, and ending November 30, 2011, utilizing a 10% per annum interest rate."[9]
Agreeing the input is a genuinely good idea and more leases should do it. The amortization window is the trouble. It ends 30 November 2011. The last possible Contraction Date under the same section is 31 May 2009. The curve never reaches zero inside the window in which the right can be used, so there is no point at which the tenant has paid off the space it is handing back. And payment is due “simultaneously with the giving of the Contraction Notice, and as a condition to the effectiveness thereof,” which here can be up to six months ahead of the date the space goes back.
Where the 2026 market actually is#
It would be convenient to say all of this matters because office tenants are shrinking. They were. They are not now, at least not in the aggregate, and a post that leaned on a give-back wave would be leaning on a 2024 fact.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Q2 2026 U.S. office MarketBeat puts national vacancy at 20.1%, down 10 basis points year over year. Net absorption for the quarter was negative 360,000 square feet, but the four-quarter rolling total was positive 14.3 million square feet, “the strongest reading since 2020,” and the report calls it “the seventh consecutive quarter of improvement.” Available sublease space is “down 15% YOY and 28% below its Q1 2024 peak, ending the most recent quarter at 96 msf.” Office completions over four quarters came to 15.6 million square feet, down 24% year over year and “marking a 14-year low,” with 19.7 million square feet under construction and asking rents at $38.38.[10] JLL’s Q2 2026 report, dated 27 July 2026, says leasing “established a new post-pandemic high” and that total vacancy is “declining aggressively with a 60 bps reduction QoQ."[11]
Sublease space is being absorbed, not created. Which cuts both ways for the clauses in this post. A tenant’s practical fallback when it has too much space is to sublet it, and that fallback is cheapest when there is a lot of competing sublease supply and a landlord who needs the deal. Both of those conditions are weakening. Meanwhile a landlord with a thin pipeline and eight quarters of declining availability has every reason to put a must-take back in the form, and less reason to grant a contraction right, or to grant one without a fee that actually hurts.
That is the honest version of the trend. Must-take is a landlord-leverage clause, and landlord leverage is what is returning.
What the alerts say, and what they leave out#
Two law firm pieces this year address the family directly, and they are worth reading against each other.
Dentons published “Legal Strategies for Managing Excess Office Space” on 11 May 2026, by Linda Warnke and Andrew Rankin out of Indianapolis. Its first legal constraint is the one this post is about: “Contraction and early termination rights are often highly conditional or absent altogether. A lease may include a one-time ‘give-back’ right exercisable only after a specified period, with strict notice requirements and significant fees. Review existing leases carefully to determine what flexibility actually exists.” It also flags a constraint neither lease above mentions, which is that “Loan documents may prohibit rent reductions or space releases without lender consent,” and a trap in the obvious workaround: “extending the term can reset termination rights or lock in unfavorable terms."[13]
Blake, Cassels & Graydon ran “Room to Grow or Shrink: Expansion and Contraction Rights in Commercial Leases” by Kassidy Doherty on 2 September 2026, as a “Five Under 5” item. It is about four hundred words and it is balanced rather than tenant-side. Three of its five bullets land exactly on the Cvent and aQuantive language: “For contractions, landlords typically want full floors or pre-designated areas to be recaptured, while tenants prefer to choose which space to surrender”; “landlords will often require a surrender fee to recoup leasing costs, making the fee calculation a key negotiation point”; and a list of drafting items ending with “any conditions for exercise, such as no tenant default."[12]
Neither piece mentions must-take space. I could not find a 2026 client alert from any firm that does. That is the gap this post exists in: the contraction side of the pair gets written up, and the obligation it is supposed to offset does not.
Conditions that quietly eat the right#
The no-default condition is the one everybody drafts and nobody prices. Cvent’s Section 50 runs it twice. The right exists only if the tenant “is not in default under the Lease beyond the expiration of any applicable notice and cure period,” and then, separately:
“Notwithstanding the foregoing, at Landlord’s option, Tenant’s exercise of the option to contract shall become null and void in the event Tenant shall be in default under the Lease between the exercise of such option and the Early Contraction Date.”
So the tenant can be clean on 31 July 2019, wire the fee, go into a cured monetary default in March 2020, and lose the contraction at the landlord’s election with the fee already paid. Section 50 says nothing about the fee coming back. The same section also conditions the right on the tenant not having assigned the lease, with a carve-out only for a Corporate Transfer, which means the contraction right does not survive the transaction most likely to create surplus space.
Then there are the geometry conditions. Cvent’s is full floors plus top-or-bottom-of-stack. aQuantive’s is subtler and much harder for a tenant to satisfy:
“The Contraction Space shall be no greater than 6,000 rentable square feet and the configuration of both the Contraction Space and the remaining portion of the Premises shall be capable of satisfying all applicable building codes and shall otherwise be in a reasonably marketable configuration, as approved by Landlord, which shall include a reasonable portion of the window lines and reasonable access to the elevator lobbies.”
Both halves have to be marketable. Both halves need window line and elevator lobby access. And the landlord approves. Carving 6,000 marketable square feet out of a floor and leaving a marketable remainder is sometimes impossible and nearly always arguable, and the clause hands the argument to the party that does not want the space back. On top of the fee, the tenant also “shall reimburse Landlord for 50% of all reasonable costs and expenses incurred by Landlord in demising and separating the Contraction Space,” which the amendment spells out as the demising wall, separating the electrical systems, rezoning the HVAC and installing a multi-tenant corridor.
Impinj’s Fifth Amendment to Office Lease, entered into as of 24 October 2025 between 400 Fairview Avenue LLC and Impinj, Inc. for space at 400 Fairview in Seattle, adds two conditions I had not seen drafted this plainly. If the retained premises ends up containing less than two full floors, the tenant “shall forfeit its right to any and all exterior signage on the Building” and has to take the signs down. And Section 10.6, headed “Termination of Contraction Option,” reads in full: “If Tenant exercises the Right of First Offer set forth in Section 12 below, the Contraction Option contained in this Section 10 shall become immediately void and of no further force and effect."[8]
Section 9.1 closes the loop from the other direction: delivering the whole-premises Termination Notice terminates the tenant’s rights under Sections 10, 11 and 12 automatically, “regardless of whether the Lease thereafter shall be terminated.” Three flexibility rights, each of which kills the others. Use the right of first offer once on a small block and the contraction option is gone for good.
A cross-reference nobody fixed#
While you are in the Impinj amendment, Section 10.1 is worth quoting for a different reason.
The contraction option is exercisable effective 11:59 p.m. on 31 August 2034, provided that “(i) not later than June 1, 2033, Landlord receives written notice from Tenant (the ‘Contraction Notice’) of Tenant’s election to exercise the Contraction Option, and (ii) concurrently with Tenant’s delivery of the Termination Notice, Tenant delivers to Landlord cash in the amount of the ‘Contraction Fee’.”
The Termination Notice is Section 9’s defined term, for terminating the entire lease. Section 10 defines its own instrument, the Contraction Notice, and then pegs payment of the contraction fee to the wrong one. Section 10.5 repeats the error: the tenant has no right to contract if it is in default “as of the date of Tenant’s delivery to Landlord of the Termination Notice.” In the whole amendment “Contraction Notice” appears twice, both in Section 10.1. “Termination Notice” appears fourteen times.
Read literally, the contraction fee is payable concurrently with a notice a contracting tenant will never deliver, and the no-default test is measured at a date that never arrives. This is in an executed amendment, filed with the SEC in February 2026, on a lease running to 31 January 2038. The fee formula it borrows from Section 9 is specific to the dollar: unamortized brokerage commissions, the improvement allowance, the base rent abatement, and the clawback of the blend-and-extend discount, being “the difference between (x) the Base Rent that would have been applicable to the Existing Premises prior to this Fifth Amendment, and (y) the Base Rent for the Existing Premises pursuant to this Fifth Amendment, during the period from September 1, 2025 through December 26, 2026,” all amortized straight line at 8%. Someone was careful about the arithmetic and nobody re-read the defined terms.
No court has ever construed one#
I went looking for a reported decision on a must-take obligation. A tenant that refused to take the space. A landlord that sued for the rent. A contraction option exercised a week late, or rejected because the landlord would not approve the configuration.
There is nothing. Searching for must-take space and its synonyms turns up clause banks and SEC exhibits, and no litigation. Nothing on a defectively exercised contraction or partial-termination option either.[15] A clause that commits a tenant to several million dollars of fixed future rent on a date certain, in as is condition, with no delivery condition, has never been read by an appellate court.
The closest useful law is about options generally, and it runs in the tenant’s favor on the condition that matters most. In J. N. A. Realty Corp. v. Cross Bay Chelsea, Inc., 42 N.Y.2d 392 (1977), paragraph 58 of a twelve-page rider required the tenant to “notify the landlord in writing by registered or certified mail six (6) months prior to the last day of the term of the lease that tenant desires such renewal.” The notice went out about five months late through inadvertence. The Court of Appeals held that equity can relieve against forfeiture of an option where the tenant is in possession, has made substantial improvements and the landlord was not prejudiced, and remanded for a new trial on prejudice.[14]
The opinion then reserves the opposite case in a sentence that reads like it was written for a 2026 downsizing:
“Finally we would note, as the dissenters do, that it is possible to imagine a situation in which a tenant holding an option to renew might intentionally delay beyond the time prescribed in order to exploit a fluctuating market.”
A tenant that misses its contraction notice by accident has an argument. A tenant that sat on the notice watching the sublease market has a worse one. Whether any of that reaches a clause where the fee is a condition precedent to effectiveness, as in both aQuantive and Cvent, is an open question, because nobody has litigated it.
The one lease where you can see how it ends#
Kilroy Realty, L.P. leased 301 Brannan Street in San Francisco to StumbleUpon, Inc. on 15 December 2011. Sixty-three full months, floors two through six, with a must-take block bringing the premises “to a total of approximately 62,852 rentable square feet.” Section 3.2 of the summary fixes the Must-Take Lease Commencement Date at 1 July 2014, flat, no conditions. Section 1.1.4.2 is about as clear as this drafting gets:[6]
“Notwithstanding anything in this Lease to the contrary, Tenant hereby acknowledges that Landlord shall deliver the Must-Take Space to Tenant, and Tenant shall accept delivery of the Must-Take Space from Landlord, on the Must-Take Lease Commencement Date… Landlord shall deliver, and Tenant shall accept, the Must Take Space in its currently existing ‘as is’ condition.”
The space landed in July 2014 with three years left on a five-and-a-quarter-year term. StumbleUpon had already sublet floors three, four and five to Okta in February 2014. On 25 August 2015, thirteen months after the must-take commenced, Kilroy “filed a complaint against Tenant for unlawful detainer on account of Tenant’s failure to pay rent” in San Francisco Superior Court.[7]
The First Amendment of 31 August 2015 settles that case, and it contains a contraction right. It belongs to the landlord. Kilroy may terminate the tenant’s lease of 12,548 square feet on the sixth floor “at any time,” on thirty days’ notice, no fee, with one limit: it loses the right if it has already consented to a sublease of that space, “provided, however, upon request by Tenant for Landlord’s consent to a sublease, Landlord may, instead, deliver the Contraction Notice.” Asking to sublet is itself the trigger. And “in no event shall Landlord be obligated to reduce the L-C Amount.”
The tenant never had a contraction right. Fourteen months after the must-take space arrived, the landlord did.
Which of your leases has a must-take date in it?#
That is a harder question than it sounds, because must-take obligations are not where you would look for them. Cvent’s is in Section 41 of 78, between Pre-Commencement Expansion and Rooftop Equipment. SailPoint Technologies’ is not in a numbered expansion section at all: its 2 October 2017 lease for the whole of Four Points Centre 3 in Austin builds the obligation out of rent abatement periods that simply expire, so that the First Must-Take Premises Start Date is “the earlier of: (A) the 9-month anniversary of the Commencement Date; or (B) the date, if any, on which Tenant elects to occupy.” Two tranches of about 20,784 and 20,783 square feet, at nine and eighteen months, and the square footages appear only in the definitions article. The word “contraction” does not appear in that document once. Neither does “reduction."[5]
Acrebase is built for exactly this read. It extracts the clause family across a portfolio and puts the fields side by side: whether there is a must-take block and what its rent commencement trigger actually is, whether that trigger has a delivery or acceptance condition or is purely calendrical, whether there is a contraction or partial-termination right, when its notice window opens and closes relative to the must-take date, whether the fee is due at notice or at surrender, what goes into the fee and at what interest rate, and which conditions sit on the right. Mismatched dates are the finding you want, and they only show up when the two sections are in the same view instead of thirty-seven pages apart. The approved clause library then supplies the version your counsel signed off on, and the negotiation playbook carries the fallbacks in the order you actually trade them: a delivery condition on the must-take date first, then a contraction window that opens before the must-take rent starts, then the fee payable at surrender rather than at notice. Because its AI reads how your earlier negotiations went, a landlord form arriving with a bare calendrical must-take comes back flagged with what your team got last time and what it gave up to get it. Related clauses we have covered: the trapdoor in a recapture clause, a tenant improvement allowance with no completion condition on disbursement, and a remeasurement clause that adds rentable feet you cannot occupy.
If you are a landlord, the must-take clause you want is the one Cvent and Kilroy both already have, and the reason it works is that it is boring. A calendar trigger, as is condition, no delivery condition, coterminous expiry. Do not improve it. Do read Section 41(vi) of the Cvent lease as a warning about complexity: it docks the tenant $5.00 per square foot of abatement if the must-take rent commencement has not occurred by month thirteen, in a clause whose outside date is month twenty-five, and no landlord benefits from a twelve-month window where the drafting argues with itself. On the contraction side, you are probably granting the right in some form, so grant it with the timing you actually want rather than refusing it: a window that opens late, full floors, top or bottom of the stack, the fee as a condition precedent, and one exercise only. That package is market, it is in two of the leases discussed here, and it costs you less than a flat no costs you in the negotiation. Decide in advance what happens to a paid fee if the tenant defaults between notice and surrender, because Cvent’s Section 50 does not say, and the tenant will argue it comes back.
If you are a tenant, five things. Put the must-take rent commencement and the contraction notice deadline on the same line of the same page before you sign, because that comparison is the entire deal and no lease will make it for you. Ask for a delivery condition on the must-take date, since a date computed purely off the commencement date means you owe rent on space that may not be ready and the as is clause tells you the landlord has no work to do. Move the fee to the surrender date, or at least to a date closer to it than twelve months out, and if it stays at notice then say in the clause that it is refundable if the contraction fails for any reason other than your own breach. Read the fee definition for what it sweeps in: Impinj’s reaches back to claw the unamortized part of a rent discount already given, which is defensible and also a number nobody quotes during negotiation. And check whether your flexibility rights cancel each other, because Impinj’s right of first offer voids its contraction option outright, and that is the sort of provision that gets agreed in a markup at the end of a long week.
One more, if you have room for it. Ask for a contraction window that opens before the must-take rent starts, not after. Nobody will give you that, but the answer tells you what the landlord thinks the space is worth.
Footnotes
[1] Deed of Lease made 23 October 2013 between TMG Solutions Plaza 1, L.L.C., TMG Solutions Plaza 2, L.L.C. and TMG Solutions Plaza 3, L.L.C., collectively as Landlord, and Cvent, Inc. as Tenant, covering 1710 SAIC Drive (Tower 1), 1709 SAIC Drive (Tower 2) and 1707 SAIC Drive (Tower 3), McLean, Virginia 22102, filed as Exhibit 10.1 on 12 November 2013. Section 41 is quoted as far as clause (i); clauses (ii) through (vii) cover coterminous expiry, base rent at the escalated per square foot rate then payable on the Initial Demised Premises multiplied by 25,666, the increased Proportionate Share, as is condition, a $70.00 per square foot construction allowance, and 2.50% annual escalation. The section closes by letting the tenant take the space early in three steps: the Tower 3 connector, then half the sixth floor of Tower 1, then the balance: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1122897/000119312513438295/d601937dex101.htm
[2] Same document, Section 50, headed “OPTION TO CONTRACT,” quoted in the body in four pieces covering the eligibility conditions, the give-back right and its geometry, the notice and fee conditions, and the landlord’s option to void a defaulting tenant’s exercise. It is quoted in full apart from one sentence extinguishing the second exercise once the first is used, and one relieving both parties of further liability for the Contraction Premises on surrender. It is the final numbered section of the lease, ending at page 77 of 78.
[3] Same document, Section 1(a), the Fundamental Lease Provisions. Item 3 breaks the Initial Demised Premises into seven blocks measured under ANSI/BOMA Z65.1-1996: 21,528 square feet each on the seventh and eighth floors of Tower 1, 17,336 each on the sixth, seventh and eighth of Tower 2, and 4,138 each on the seventh and eighth of Tower 3. Item 4 pre-computes the Proportionate Share before and after the must-take, 17.17% of the Building rising to 21.44%. Item 9 is the rent table for the Initial Demised Premises: $0 in lease year 1, then $28.70, $29.42, $30.16, $30.91, $31.68 and $32.47 per square foot in lease years 2 through 7. Those are the rates the body arithmetic uses, because Section 41(iii) incorporates them by reference; Section 2(d) makes both premises subject to remeasurement.
[4] My arithmetic, not the lease’s. Taking the commencement date as the anticipated 1 August 2014, the twenty-fifth full calendar month following it is September 2016, so must-take rent commences 1 September 2016, in lease year 3. Applying the note 3 rates to 21,528 square feet from that date to 31 July 2020 gives eleven months of lease year 3 at $29.42 ($580,531), then full years at $30.16, $30.91 and $31.68 ($649,284, $665,430 and $682,007), totaling $2,577,296, and $56,834 a month in lease year 6. The same window on the full 25,666 square foot block is $3,072,691. The fee illustration takes the $70.00 allowance on 21,528 square feet ($1,506,960), halves it per Section 50, amortizes it in level monthly installments at 8% over the 132-month initial term ($8,601 a month) and reads the balance with sixty months left at 31 July 2020: $424,203, or $19.70 per square foot. That isolates one of three fee components: Section 50 also includes brokerage fees and free rent, and the lease states neither, so the real fee is higher by an amount the filed document does not permit anyone to compute. Level monthly amortization is my assumption, since Section 50 gives no convention.
[5] Lease between BDN Four Points Land LP as Landlord and SailPoint Technologies, Inc. as Tenant for Four Points Centre 3 at 11120 Four Points Drive, Austin, Texas 78726, filed as Exhibit 10.24 on 20 October 2017. Premises of 164,818 square feet, the entire building. The cover page carries no date on its face: Section 1(dd) defines the Execution Date as the later of the two signatures, and both signature blocks read 10/2/17, which is the date used in the body. The must-take mechanics sit in Section 4(f) through (h) as abatement periods ending the day before each Must-Take Premises Start Date, and the two blocks are defined only in Section 1(l) and 1(z) at 20,784 and 20,783 square feet. Section 1(i) carves mere circulation through the space and the presence of furniture out of “conducting business,” which stops early occupancy being triggered by accident. String counts in the stripped text: “Must-Take” 69, “Contraction” 0, “Reduction” 0: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1627857/000119312517315396/d392110dex1024.htm
[6] Office Lease dated 15 December 2011 between Kilroy Realty, L.P. as Landlord and StumbleUpon, Inc. as Tenant for 301 Brannan Street, San Francisco, attached as Exhibit A to the sublease at note 7 and filed as Exhibit 10.5 by Okta, Inc. on 13 March 2017. Summary Section 2.2 describes the must-take block as increasing the premises “to a total of approximately 62,852 rentable square feet”; Section 3.1 gives a term of sixty-three full months; Section 3.2 fixes the Must-Take Lease Commencement Date at 1 July 2014 while making the Initial Lease Commencement Date the earlier of 120 days after mutual execution and 1 April 2012. Summary Section 5 sets a later base year for the must-take space than for the initial premises, which is a landlord-favorable detail a tenant watching only the rental rate can miss: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1660134/000119312517080301/d289173dex105.htm
[7] First Amendment to Office Lease made as of 31 August 2015 between Kilroy Realty, L.P. and StumbleUpon, Inc., in the same exhibit as note 6. Recital B recites the 25 August 2015 unlawful detainer complaint in San Francisco Superior Court and the tenant’s denial of liability; Recital C states the amendment settles and dismisses it with prejudice without admission of liability; Recital D records the February 2014 sublease of floors three, four and five (37,815 square feet) to Okta, consented to on 31 March 2014, leaving a Retained Premises of 25,037 square feet on floors two and six. Section 5, “Landlord Contraction Right,” is quoted as to the thirty day notice, the 12,548 square feet on the sixth floor, the sublease-consent limitation and the letter of credit sentence; it also cuts Tenant’s Share by 16.8588% on the Contraction Date. The sublease itself is dated “as of February , 2014” in the filed text, with the day left blank.
[8] Fifth Amendment to Office Lease entered into as of 24 October 2025 between 400 Fairview Avenue LLC as Landlord and Impinj, Inc. as Tenant, 400 Fairview Avenue N., Seattle, filed as Exhibit 10.34 on 9 February 2026. Recital A sets out the chain from an Office Lease dated 10 December 2014 through four prior amendments. The existing premises are remeasured to 70,432 square feet of a 344,755 square foot building, with an extended expiration date of 31 January 2038. Section 10 is the Contraction Option, quoted at 10.1, 10.2, 10.3.4, 10.5 and 10.6. The “Unamortized Costs” definition quoted in the body sits in Section 9, the whole-premises Termination Right, and Section 10.2 borrows it. Counts in the stripped text: “Termination Notice” 14, “Contraction Notice” 2. The 26 December 2026 end date on the blend-and-extend clawback is the document’s own: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1114995/000119312526042813/pi-ex10_34.htm
[9] First Amendment to Lease made as of 15 April 2004 between Chicago Fulton Venture, L.L.C. as Landlord and SBI Group, Inc. as Tenant, amending a Lease dated 20 July 1999 originally between 600 West Fulton L.L.C. and Lante Corporation for 600 West Fulton Street, Chicago, Illinois, filed as Exhibit 10.4 by aQuantive, Inc. on 9 November 2004. Section 10 is quoted at subsections (a), (b), (c) and in part (d). Section 11, immediately following, replaces the original lease’s Section 28 with a whole-lease termination right effective 31 December 2008, the day before the earliest possible Contraction Date, which explains why the contraction window is as short as it is. Both notices are expressed with “time being of the essence”: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1071806/000119312504191425/dex104.htm
[10] Cushman & Wakefield, MarketBeat, United States Office Q2 2026. Every figure in the body is quoted from the report’s own key takeaways and market overview. It also records deliveries at 0.3% of inventory against 0.6% in 2024, with only Austin, Cleveland, Puget Sound Eastside and Midtown Manhattan above 1.0%, and inventory itself shrinking through conversions and demolitions. This is one brokerage’s series and other houses measure vacancy on different inventory definitions, so treat the direction as the finding rather than the decimal: https://assets.cushmanwakefield.com/-/media/cw/marketbeat-pdfs/2026/q2/us-reports/national/q2-2026-office-marketbeat.pdf
[11] JLL, U.S. Office Market Dynamics, Q2 2026, dated 27 July 2026, by Jacob Rowden. The summary also reports occupancy gains of over 30 million square feet across the preceding twelve months, availability declining for eight consecutive quarters, and leasing up 27% on a trailing twelve month basis against the prior five-year average: https://www.jll.com/en-us/insights/market-dynamics/us-office
[12] Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, “Room to Grow or Shrink: Expansion and Contraction Rights in Commercial Leases,” by Kassidy Doherty, 2 September 2026, in the firm’s “Five Under 5” series. The overview frames both rights as tools that “reallocate risk, costs and control between the parties.” This is Canadian commentary on Canadian practice, cited for the drafting points, which are not jurisdiction-specific, rather than for any proposition of law: https://www.blakes.com/insights/room-to-grow-or-shrink-expansion-and-contraction-rights-in-commercial-leases/
[13] Dentons, “Legal Strategies for Managing Excess Office Space,” by Linda Warnke and Andrew Rankin, 11 May 2026. The alert lists seven constraints, from give-back rights and subleasing through lender consent and blend-and-extend. Note the tension with notes 10 and 11: it is from May 2026 and reads the tenant as holding leverage, which the second-quarter absorption and sublease figures published later in the year do not obviously support: https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/alerts/2026/may/11/legal-strategies-for-managing-excess-office-space
[14] J. N. A. Realty Corp. v. Cross Bay Chelsea, Inc., 42 N.Y.2d 392 (N.Y. 1977), decided 16 June 1977. The lease ran ten years from 1 January 1964 and paragraph 58 of a twelve-page rider carried the renewal option and the notice requirement quoted in the body; the notice was late by roughly five months. The Court of Appeals asked whether enforcing the letter of the agreement would work a forfeiture and whether equity may relieve one caused by the tenant’s own neglect, answered both in the tenant’s favor in principle, and remanded because the trial court had treated the landlord’s reliance as immaterial. Read as persuasive by analogy only: it concerns a renewal option, and this post concerns a contraction option whose fee is a condition precedent: https://static.case.law/ny-2d/42/cases/0392-01.json
[15] On the empty searches. SEC full-text search returns 290 documents containing “Must-Take Space,” 102 containing “Must-Take Premises,” 273 containing “Contraction Space” and 120 containing “Contraction Notice,” but the query combining a must-take term with a contraction term returns a single lease, the Cvent deed of lease at note 1, which is why this post is built on it. Combining “Must-Take Space” with “Reduction Option” returns nothing at all. For case law, the federal opinions collection and the state reporter mirrors reachable here hold nothing construing a must-take obligation, a refused expansion obligation, or a disputed contraction exercise, and I found no 2026 client alert from any firm that names must-take space. Two cautions: disputes of this size are often arbitrated or settled, or decided in state trial courts I did not search, and the filed population of leases is skewed toward those material enough to be a public company’s exhibit, so absence in EDGAR is weaker evidence than presence. A lead on Pack 2000, Inc. v. Cushman, 311 Conn. 662 (2014), which holds that a substantial rather than strict compliance standard governs a lease compliance condition on an option absent explicit contrary language, looked directly relevant to the no-default conditions above, but the Connecticut Reports volume could not be verified within this post’s research window and it is not relied on.
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