Amalgamated Bank signed a lease for the ground, second, third and fifth floors of 99 Park Avenue in Manhattan, dated as of 4 April 2025. Article 29 promises heat and air conditioning on Business Days from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and cooling only from 15 April through 30 September. Everything else is sold by the hour:
“If Tenant shall request heating, ventilating or air-conditioning services for the Office Premises for extended hours or at any time other than as set forth above, Owner may, provided same is available, furnish such service for such times upon no less than 24 hours’ advance notice, and Tenant shall pay to Owner upon demand as Additional Rent Owner’s then established charges therefor (subject to a four (4) hour minimum charge for non-Business Day usage and for usage on Business Days that is not contiguous to Operating Hours). The current Building standard charge for such (x) heating service is $550.00 per hour per floor, (y) air-conditioning service is $750.00 per hour per floor and (z) ventilation service is $450.00 per hour per floor."[1]
Then, two sentences later, a sentence that is easy to read past: “any order for overtime HVAC service for the Third Floor Premises or the Fifth Floor Premises must serve both floors.”
So price a Saturday in July. Saturday is not a Business Day, which triggers the four hour minimum. An order for the third floor drags the fifth along, which makes it two floors. Four hours times two floors times $750.00 is $6,000, and that is the number whether the people who came in stay for four hours or for forty minutes. The lease does not say $6,000 anywhere. It says $750.00, in a parenthesis, described as “current.”
The hours you have already paid for#
Every one of the six leases read for this post sets standard HVAC hours at 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays. They differ entirely on Saturday, and Saturday is where the money is.
At 99 Park Avenue there is no Saturday. Weekdays only, and cooling for five and a half months of the year.
At One Federal Street in Boston, Centessa Pharmaceuticals gets HVAC “except for Observed Holidays, (a) from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays, and (b) from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturdays."[2] Five free hours a week more than Amalgamated, written into the service standard.
At 1 Prudential Plaza in Chicago, Cision gets the same weekday band and then Saturdays “from 8:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.” with a condition attached, “if requested by Tenant in accordance with Landlord’s standard notice requirements”.[3] The Saturday hours are inside the defined term “Building Hours,” so they are not overtime and they are not billed. They just do not happen unless somebody asks.
CarGurus’ lease at 55 Cambridge Parkway defines Normal Business Hours as “8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Business Days and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays,” and then says this:
“Notwithstanding die foregoing, as an energy conservation measure, Landlord will not run heating and air conditioning equipment serving the Premises on Saturdays unless requested by Tenant (provided that Tenant shall not be charged for such Saturday service unless it is outside of Normal Business Hours)."[4]
ICF’s Reston Station lease goes further and buys the Saturday back by name. Building Operating Hours are Business Days 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. plus “Requested Saturday Mornings”: 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. If ICF emails or faxes by 3:00 p.m. Friday and specifies the hours it wants, “Landlord shall provide HVAC service to the Premises at no additional charge to Tenant during the requested period (but not before 9:00 a.m. or after 1:00 p.m.) on such Requested Saturday Morning."[5]
Four of these five Saturday provisions are conditional on a request, and in three of them the request has a deadline. That is the quiet trade in this clause family. A Saturday morning is free, and a request made at 4:00 p.m. on Friday converts the same four hours into a billed order at whatever the hourly rate happens to be.
The billing unit decides the bill#
The rate is the number everyone negotiates. The unit is the number that moves the invoice.
Four of the six charge per floor: $750.00 at 99 Park Avenue, $155.00 at One Federal Street, $80.00 at 255 State Street in Boston, $60.00 at Reston Station. Those are comparable to each other, and a tenant on two floors knows it is buying two.
Cision’s lease charges at “such hourly cost per zone” as the landlord has established it.[3] CarGurus’ charges “$75.00 per hour per air handler utilized for the Premises."[4] Neither document says how many zones or air handlers serve the premises. A floor is a thing a tenant can count. A zone is a thing the building’s mechanical drawings define, and a 49,464 square foot floor at Prudential Plaza has more than one of them. The same four hours can be billed two or three times over without the rate ever changing, and the tenant will find out the count from the first invoice.
This is the same problem as a rent number quoted against a rentable area nobody has measured, which is what the remeasurement post was about: the price per unit is public and the unit count is the landlord’s.
ICF’s lease is the only one that prorates in the tenant’s direction, and it does it twice in one phrase. The $60.00 is charged “per hour (or any portion thereof) per floor (or any portion thereof) of the Building”.[5] Forty minutes on half a floor is billed as forty minutes on half a floor.
The minimum that nobody prices#
Three of the six impose a minimum billing increment, and the design of the minimum matters more than its length.
Amalgamated’s is four hours, but not always: it applies to “non-Business Day usage and for usage on Business Days that is not contiguous to Operating Hours”. Staying until 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday is billed by the hour, because 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. is contiguous. Coming in at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday is four hours minimum. Coming back in at 9:00 p.m. on a Tuesday after everyone went home at 6:00 is also four hours minimum, because the usage is no longer contiguous. That is a well drafted minimum, from the landlord’s side, and it is the only one of the three that distinguishes between extending a day and starting a new one.
255 State Street sets two hours, the shortest in the set.[2]
And then there is Centessa’s Section 1.6, which handles three overtime services in a single block of text:
“The ‘Overtime HVAC Charge’ is currently $155.00 per hour per floor, and shall be subject to increase by Landlord from time to time. If Landlord furnishes freight elevator service during Overtime Periods, then Tenant shall pay to Landlord the then-applicable Overtime Freight Elevator Charge (as hereinafter defined). The ‘Overtime Freight Elevator Charge’ is currently $35.00 per hour with a four (4) hour minimum and shall be subject to increase by Landlord from time to time. If Landlord furnishes loading dock service during Overtime Periods, then Tenant shall pay to Landlord the then-applicable Overtime Loading Dock Service Charge (as hereinafter defined). The ‘Overtime Loading Dock Service Charge’ is currently $35.00 per hour with a four (4) hour minimum and shall be subject to increase by Landlord from time to time."[2]
The $35.00 services carry a four hour minimum. The $155.00 service does not. Three parallel sentences, drafted by the same hand on the same afternoon, and the expensive one is the only one billed honestly by the hour. I cannot tell you whether that was negotiated or whether it is what the form always said, because the form it came from is not a filed document. It is the best single provision for a tenant in any of the six leases, and it is four words long by virtue of what it leaves out.
Who gets to set the number#
Strip the dollar figures out and the six leases fall into three groups.
The first group states a rate and reserves the right to change it. All of them do this, so the question is what standard the change has to meet. Amalgamated’s is the strongest version of the weak form: “Owner reserves the right from time to time to increase the aforesaid charges in a commercially reasonable and Building standard manner upon notice to Tenant."[1] Centessa’s and 255 State Street’s share a single formula, word for word, written by two unrelated landlords: “subject to increase by Landlord from time to time."[2] No reasonableness, no notice, no cap, no cost relationship. The $155.00 and the $80.00 are facts about the day the lease was signed.
The second group ties the rate to cost. CarGurus’ lease itemizes it:
“The costs incurred by Landlord in providing HVAC service to Tenant at a time other than Normal Business Hours, shall include costs for electricity, water, sewage, water treatment, labor, metering, filtering, and maintenance reasonably allocated by Landlord to providing such service (collectively, the ‘Overtime HVAC Charge’)."[4]
Eight components, a closed list, and “reasonably allocated.” No markup is mentioned, in either direction.
ICF’s is the whole argument in one sentence, and it is the best tenant-side drafting I found on this clause:
“Landlord reserves the right to adjust, from time to time, the After-Hours HVAC Charge, based on Landlord’s reasonable determination of increases in the cost (without mark-up) incurred by Landlord in providing such service, provided that Landlord shall limit future increases in such rate to actual increases in the cost of Landlord’s delivery of such service including, without limitation, increased maintenance contract and utility costs, but shall not include any markup for depreciation, profit, overhead or administrative fees."[5]
The $60.00 is not a price. It is a pass-through with four named things it may not include, a thirty day notice requirement before any change, and 300 hours a year during which ICF does not even pay the depreciation and overhead component. The same lease excludes from Operating Costs “the cost of after-hours HVAC, freight elevator and loading dock service billed to other tenants,” which closes the obvious loophole: ICF is not paying twice, once through its own invoice and again through its share of everyone else’s.
The third group is one lease. Cision’s Section 6.2 hands the landlord every variable in the clause:
“Tenant shall give Landlord such prior notice, if any, as Landlord shall from time to time establish as appropriate, of Tenant’s desired use in order to supply such utilities, and Landlord shall supply such utilities to Tenant at such hourly cost per zone to Tenant (which shall be treated as Additional Rent) as Landlord has established (the ‘After Hours HVAC Charge’). Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary contained in this Lease, Tenant shall promptly pay to Landlord Landlord’s standard charge (which shall include Landlord’s standard administrative charge) for any services provided to Tenant which Landlord is not specifically obligated to provide to Tenant pursuant to the terms of this Lease."[3]
The notice period is whatever the landlord establishes. The rate is whatever the landlord has established. The unit is a zone. And the back-stop sentence adds an administrative charge that is never quantified anywhere in the lease. Cision’s base rent in lease year one was $18.25 per rentable square foot, a number fixed for eight years in a table on page two of the summary. The hourly cooling charge, $136.00 on the day of signing, was fixed for no time at all.
A markup you can see is a negotiation. ICF’s clause names four kinds of markup so that it can forbid them. Cision’s names one so that it can collect it. This is the same split as the electricity resale question in the rent inclusion factor post, where the markup floor and the markup cap sat in the same article and the floor won.
For what it is worth, I went looking for a lease that applies an explicit percentage markup to the after-hours HVAC rate and did not find one in the filed corpus.[6] The closest thing in these documents is in ICF’s 1999 Tysons Corner sublease, and it is the shuttle bus: “Landlord’s reasonable estimate of its actual cost of providing such after-hours service, including labor, cost of fuel, and wear and tear on equipment, plus an allowance of 10% thereof to cover general overhead."[5] A landlord who will put ten percent on a bus will not write it next to the chillers.
Notice is the clause that actually bites#
The rate is what the post is nominally about. The notice requirement is what decides whether anyone pays it.
Twenty four hours is the common standard: 99 Park Avenue, One Federal Street, 255 State Street. Only one of the three says who to tell. Centessa notifies “the management office for the Building” and gets a softener worth having, since the landlord “will exercise commercially reasonable efforts to accommodate requests of Tenant to provide such services on such shorter notice as may be provided by Tenant."[2] 255 State Street is the only clause in the set that names a human and allows a phone call: “which request may be made via telephone or email to the Building manager."[2]
Then there are the two that cut off the day before. CarGurus must deliver a written request “before 3:00 p.m. on the Business Day preceding such extra usage,” with no same-day option at all.[4] ICF has the same 3:00 p.m. deadline, “and not later than 3:00 p.m. on Friday, or if Friday is a Holiday, then the immediately preceding Business Day, for weekend service”.[5]
That 3:00 p.m. Friday cut-off is the most durable thing in this whole clause family. It appears in the 1999 sublease ICF took from ICF Kaiser at 9300 Lee Highway in Tysons Corner, in a prime lease provision that sets no rate whatsoever: “provided Tenant gives Landlord notice prior to 3:00 P.M. (in the case of after-hours service on weekdays) and prior to 3:00 P.M. on Fridays or the day preceding a holiday (in the case of after-hours service on Saturdays, Sundays or holidays)."[5] Twenty years and one move later, in a 2019 lease for 208,273.94 square feet at a transit-oriented development on the Dulles Toll Road, the deadline is still 3:00 p.m. Friday. The blank rate did not survive. The cut-off did.
And Cision’s clause has no notice period to miss, which is worse rather than better. A notice period of “such prior notice, if any, as Landlord shall from time to time establish as appropriate” is a requirement the tenant cannot plan around and cannot breach, because it does not exist until the landlord announces it. The same words govern the nominally free Saturday morning.
Condenser water runs whether you use it or not#
Three of the six leases sell condenser water for a tenant’s supplemental cooling, and they price it per ton per year rather than per hour: $500.00 at 99 Park Avenue, $560.00 plus a $1,500.00 tap-in fee at One Federal Street, $650.00 at 255 State Street.[1][2] All three use the same escalation language they used for the hourly charge, which at One Federal and 255 State is the bare “subject to increase by Landlord from time to time.”
Amalgamated’s version carries the sharpest sentence in any of the documents. The Condenser Water Charge is payable from the date the owner reserves capacity,
“without regard to whether Tenant’s supplemental air-conditioning system is actually installed or whether such condenser water is actually used by Tenant, and (II) subject to increase during the term of this Lease.”
Twenty tons is the Maximum Number of Tons. At $500.00 a ton that is $10,000 a year for a reservation, and the clause is explicit that installation and use are both irrelevant to the obligation. The tap-in fee is waived only if the request comes on or before the second anniversary of the Office Commencement Date, which means the lease prices procrastination too.
Cision’s condenser water clause, three paragraphs below the HVAC clause that gives the landlord everything, is metered: the tenant installs water meters at its own cost and pays “an annual charge for such condenser water at reasonable rates based on Tenant’s actual use thereof, which charge shall be payable as Additional Rent."[3] Same lease, same article, same drafter. Measured and reasonableness-qualified for the water, unilateral for the air.
The overtime hour gets counted twice#
The Amalgamated lease was signed in April 2025, which is late enough that New York City’s carbon penalties had to be allocated somewhere. Article 7 does it by defining the tenant’s share of the building’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the definition reaches the overtime invoice:
“‘Tenant’s GHG Emissions’ means the amount of greenhouse emissions … attributable to all energy used in the Demised Premises (x) by Tenant and anyone claiming by, through or under Tenant and (y) to provide overtime HVAC service and any other non-building standard utility service requested by Tenant to the Demised Premises”
The building-wide figure it feeds into, Leasable Area GHG Emissions, is determined partly by “documented overtime HVAC services provided”.[1]
So the $750.00 buys the hour, and the carbon attributable to that hour comes back in a separate column. Both are defensible on their own. Together they mean the overtime log is now a compliance document as well as a billing record, and a tenant negotiating the emissions allocation in a compliance-with-laws clause should know that its own Saturday requests are one of the inputs. This is a cleaner allocation than most. It is also the only lease of the six where asking for air conditioning has two prices.
A cross-reference to a section that does not exist#
One small thing in the Centessa lease, because it is the kind of thing that survives into a signed document and then matters when someone argues about it.
Section 1.6 defines Overtime Periods as the times other than those “set forth in Section 10.3 (with respect to freight elevator service and loading dock service) and Section 10.4 (with respect to HVAC)”. There is no Section 10.3 or Section 10.4 in the lease. Article 10 is headed SERVICES and then restarts its subsection numbering at Section 1.1, so the hours the clause is pointing at are in Section 1.4 and Section 1.3. The strings “Section 10.3” and “Section 10.4” appear exactly once each in the whole document, both inside Section 1.6.
Nobody is going to lose an argument over this. The hours are findable, the intent is obvious, and a court would read it the way everyone reads it. It is in here because the clause that tells you when the meter starts running is the clause that got the broken pointer, and because it is a reminder that these provisions are assembled from forms rather than written.
Does your portfolio know what an hour of cooling costs?#
Six documents and six different answers to four questions.[6] What are the standard hours, and is Saturday in them or sold. What is the unit. What is the minimum. Who sets the number next year. The answers are scattered across a services article, a basic lease information table, a definitions list, an operating expense exclusion and a notice deadline buried in a subordinate clause, and no two leases put them in the same place.
Acrebase pulls those four answers out of each lease and lines them up across a portfolio, so a rate capped to actual cost with no markup and a rate that is “as Landlord has established” stop appearing in the same column as if they were comparable terms. The clause library holds the version your counsel approved with the fallbacks in the order you actually trade them, which here is usually the unit first, then the escalation standard, then the notice period. The AI drafts and redlines against that standard, so a four hour minimum attached to the $155.00 service instead of the $35.00 service is something you catch on the first read of a form rather than on the third Saturday of the term.
If you are a landlord, the honest position is that overtime HVAC is a cost recovery and should look like one. ICF’s clause gives its tenant a no-markup covenant, 300 free overhead hours a year and a free Saturday morning, and the landlord still recovers every dollar of electricity, labor and maintenance contract cost it spends, with a thirty day notice right to adjust. That is a clause nobody audits and nobody fights about. Where you should hold the line is the unit and the minimum, not the rate: a minimum that distinguishes an extension of the business day from a cold start, the way Amalgamated’s four hour non-contiguous minimum does, is defensible because it tracks what the plant actually has to do. A minimum that applies to a two hour request contiguous with the day is a fee. And consider writing Saturday mornings into the service standard rather than selling them. Three of these six landlords did, it costs very little in a building that is already conditioned, and it removes the single most common service complaint an office tenant has.
If you are a tenant, do four things while the form is still a draft. First, find out the unit count before you accept the rate, and if the clause says “per zone” or “per air handler”, ask for the number in writing and then ask for it to be in the lease. A $75.00 per air handler rate on a floor with four air handlers is a $300.00 rate. Second, read the minimum against your actual pattern of use. If your people work until 8:00 p.m. three nights a week, a minimum that treats a contiguous extension as a new order is the most expensive word in the clause, and moving one qualifier fixes it. Third, make the escalation standard do some work. “Subject to increase by Landlord from time to time” is not a price term, and the replacement does not have to be a cap: ICF took a cost-only limit with a list of excluded markups, which is easier for a landlord to accept than a percentage ceiling and gives the tenant an argument it can actually make. Fourth, treat the notice deadline as a term and not as an administrative detail. A free Saturday that requires an email by 3:00 p.m. Friday is worth exactly as much as your facilities team’s calendar discipline, so get the deadline shortened, get a named recipient, and get the phone call allowed the way 255 State Street allows it. Then ask what the condenser water reservation costs you in the years before you install anything.
Footnotes
[1] Office Lease between 99 PARK AVENUE ASSOCIATES, L.P., as Owner, and AMALGAMATED BANK, as Tenant, for the ground, second, third and fifth floors at 99 Park Avenue, New York, New York, dated as of April 4, 2025. Filed as Exhibit 10.1 to Amalgamated Financial Corp.’s Form 8-K, accession 0001823608-25-000025, on 8 April 2025: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1823608/000182360825000025/officelease-99parkavenue.htm
Article 29 is the services article. Subsection (D)(I) carries the HVAC hours and the overtime rates, (D)(ii) the supplemental air conditioning provision, (E)(ii) the condenser water terms, and (B) the overtime freight elevator charge of $100.00 per hour with a four consecutive hour minimum and 48 hours’ notice, of which the owner waives up to fifty hours for the initial alterations and move-in. The Local Law 97 definitions quoted in the body are in Article 7, which defines Base Building GHG Emissions, Leasable Area GHG Emissions, Total GHG Emissions, Total GHG Emissions Limit and Tenant’s GHG Emissions in sequence. The supplemental air conditioning provision in (D)(ii) sets a cost floor rather than a cap, requiring operation at a charge “in no event at a rate less than Owner’s actual cost therefor including labor, materials and utilities.” The $6,000 Saturday figure in the opening is my arithmetic on the document’s own terms, taking the four hour minimum as triggered by non-Business-Day usage and the two floor order requirement as stated; the lease states the $750.00 rate and the two conditions separately and never multiplies them. The HVAC specifications are in an Exhibit F that is part of the filing; the owner’s schedule of “then established charges” is not a filed document.
[2] Lease between ONE FEDERAL, L.P., as Landlord, and CENTESSA PHARMACEUTICALS, INC., as Tenant, for premises on the 38th floor of One Federal Street, Boston, Massachusetts, dated February 7, 2022 on its cover page. Filed as Exhibit 10.35 to Centessa Pharmaceuticals plc’s Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2021, accession 0001847903-22-000022, on 30 March 2022: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1847903/000184790322000022/a20211231ex1035onefederals.htm
Article 10 SERVICES restarts its subsection numbering at Section 1.1, so the overtime charges are in Section 1.6, the HVAC hours in Section 1.4 and the condenser water terms in Section 1.5, notwithstanding the cross-references discussed in the body. Section 1.5 states the condenser water charge as “currently $560.00 per ton per annum” and the tap-in fee as “currently $1,500.00,” both “subject to increase by Landlord from time to time.” A page number “-19-” sits inside the Section 1.6 sentence about commercially reasonable efforts in the filed document and has been removed from the quotation. Article 28 is the extension term and does not carve out any of the overtime charges, so they are inherited by a renewal at whatever rate then applies.
The 255 State Street material is from a different filing. The prime lease is between 255 STATE STREET, LLC, as Landlord, and SILVER BRIDGE ADVISORS LLC, as Tenant, for 255 State Street, Boston, Massachusetts, dated October 5, 2010, guaranteed by Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP. It reaches the public record as Exhibit A to a sublease dated as of the 27th day of February, 2015 between Boston Private Wealth LLC as Sublandlord and Tokai Pharmaceuticals, Inc. as Subtenant, filed as Exhibit 10.18 to Tokai’s Form 10-K, accession 0001193125-15-107051, on 26 March 2015: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1404281/000119312515107051/d832380dex1018.htm Section 5.1.2 is the Overtime HVAC provision, 5.1.1 the condenser water provision, and 4.2.5 the charging provision that makes both Additional Rent. A page number “27” sits inside the Section 4.2.5 sentence in the filed document.
[3] Office Lease between BFPRU I, LLC, as Landlord, and CISION US, INC., as Tenant, for Suite 700, 49,464 rentable square feet on the seventh floor of 1 Prudential Plaza, 130 East Randolph Drive, Chicago, Illinois, dated September 22, 2014 per item 1 of the Summary of Basic Lease Information. Filed as Exhibit 10.18 to Cision Ltd.’s Form 8-K, accession 0001144204-17-035922, on 6 July 2017, nearly three years after the lease date: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1701040/000114420417035922/v469777_ex10-18.htm
Section 6.1.1 defines Building Hours and the Holidays, Section 6.2 is Overstandard Tenant Use and carries the After Hours HVAC Charge, and Section 6.3 is Condenser Water. The $18.25 per rentable square foot figure is lease year one of the base rent table in the Summary, which runs eight lease years from a Lease Commencement Date of 1 February 2015. Section 6.2 also governs excess electricity, charging “the cost of the increased wear and tear on existing equipment caused by such excess consumption (as determined by Landlord).” Two things in the document as filed: the clause reads “(or opposed to Landlord’s standard language charge)” where “as opposed to Landlord’s standard charge” is plainly meant, and a page number “22” sits between the end of Section 6.2 and the Section 6.3 heading. The exhibit is a conformed copy with unsigned signature blocks, which is why the date comes from the Summary rather than from an execution line.
[4] Lease between 55 CAMBRIDGE PARKWAY, LLC, as Landlord, and CARGURUS, INC., as Tenant, for approximately 30,534 rentable square feet at 55 Cambridge Parkway, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a date of execution of March 11, 2016. Filed as Exhibit 10.9 to CarGurus’ Form S-1, accession 0001047469-17-005904, on 15 September 2017, eighteen months after execution: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1494259/000104746917005904/a2233230zex-10_9.htm Identical text was filed as Exhibit 10.8 under accession 0000912057-17-000169 in June 2017.
Section 7(a) is the services provision and Section 7(b) covers excess utility use, under which the landlord “may determine the amount of such additional consumption and potential consumption by any verifiable method, including installation of a separate meter in the Premises installed, maintained, and read by Landlord, at Tenant’s expense.” Normal Business Hours is a defined term in Section 1. The phrase “Notwithstanding die foregoing” is in the document as filed, an extraction artifact in the public record for “the foregoing,” and I have quoted it as it appears rather than correcting it. Section 7(a)(ii) prices other additional services “at equitable rates from time to time established by Landlord,” which is a fourth escalation standard and the vaguest of them.
[5] Deed of Lease between CRS PLAZA II, LC, as Landlord, and ICF CONSULTING GROUP, INC., as Tenant, for premises at Reston Station, Fairfax County, Virginia, dated October 24, 2019. Filed as Exhibit 10.1 to ICF International’s Form 8-K, accession 0001437749-19-020930, on 30 October 2019: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1362004/000143774919020930/ex_161891.htm
Section 9(a)(ii) is the After-Hours HVAC Services provision and is quoted at length in the body. Building Operating Hours and the Requested Saturday Mornings window of 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. are stated in the basic lease information at the front of the document, which also gives the Net Rentable Area figure of 208,273.94 square feet used in the body and a Tenant Improvement Allowance of $110.00 per square foot. The operating cost exclusion for other tenants’ after-hours service is exclusion (v). The lease also lets ICF move the Building Operating Hours themselves on thirty days’ notice while it leases all the office space in the building, so long as the adjusted hours stay comparable to those of Comparable Buildings, which is a provision only a sole office tenant gets.
The 1999 document is an Agreement of Sublease made in June 1999 between ICF Kaiser International, Inc. and ICF Consulting Group, Inc. for 9300 and 9302 Lee Highway, Tysons Corner, Virginia, filed as Exhibit 10.12 to ICF International’s registration statement, accession 0001193125-06-109194, on 11 May 2006: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1362004/000119312506109194/dex1012.htm The 3:00 p.m. notice provision is in paragraph 10(c) of the prime lease as reproduced there, and it states no rate at all. The ten percent overhead allowance quoted in the body is section 31 of that document and applies to after-hours shuttle bus service, not to HVAC; I include it because it is the only explicit percentage markup on any after-hours service in anything I read.
[6] On sources and method. These seven documents were found through SEC EDGAR full text search at efts.sec.gov, which indexes filings from 2001 onward, and every quotation was checked against the stripped text of the filing itself rather than against a search result snippet. The subject word is useless here: “HVAC” is in nearly every office lease ever filed. What finds the clause is the defined charge and the unit, so “Overtime HVAC,” “after-hours HVAC,” “per hour per floor” and “condenser water” are the productive queries, while “HVAC Overtime Charge” returns nothing at all across the whole index and “Landlord’s then-prevailing rate” near HVAC returns four filings, none of them useful. The category of clause where the landlord simply sets the price is not written as a prevailing rate formula. It is written as “subject to increase by Landlord from time to time,” or as “as Landlord has established,” and those phrases read like boilerplate rather than like a pricing term, which is presumably why they survive review.
Three limits. The seven documents were chosen because they disagree with each other, not as a sample of the market, and all of them were filed because they were material to a public company, which concentrates them in Manhattan, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago and Northern Virginia and in tenants with dense headcounts. I looked for two leases from the same landlord on this clause family and there is no such pair in the index: every landlord entity here appears against exactly one tenant. And I found no lease applying a stated percentage markup to the hourly HVAC rate itself, so the claim in the body is about what is in the filed corpus, not about what landlords charge.
The other limit is the commentary, and it is a real gap. A survey of law firm client alerts, bar journal articles and trade press published between 1 August and 22 October 2026 on after-hours HVAC charges, building operating hours or landlord recovery of service costs in office leases turned up nothing dated in that window. What exists is vendor material: scheduling companies, broker SEO pages, and clause banks, several of which quote 2025 rate surveys. Two in-window trade pieces come close and then miss the clause entirely. Matt Johnson’s “The Lease Clauses That Produce Disputes” in Lawyer Monthly, 15 September 2026, covers operating expense pass-throughs, repairs, holdover and casualty and never reaches building services. A syndicated Stacker piece on hidden office lease costs, 2 September 2026, mentions HVAC only as build-out capital expenditure. So this post is built on the documents, and the gap is in what is being written rather than a claim that the question is settled. The one adjacent family that is being written about is in-building telecommunications and rooftop access, where Harry Klaff and Craig Gillespie argued in Commercial Observer on 22 September 2026 that office tenants should negotiate carrier coverage as a lease issue. The parallel is exact and nobody has drawn it: a service the building used to just provide is becoming a term you have to price.
Acrebase is AI-powered contract intelligence for commercial real estate. It drafts, redlines and proofreads leases and other CRE documents, extracts clauses and flags risk across a portfolio, and keeps a team’s approved clause library and negotiation playbook consistent from one deal to the next, with fallback positions drawn from how earlier negotiations actually went. Learn more at acrebase.com, or get in touch about pricing.