Entrada Therapeutics signed a lease for the fifth and sixth floors of One Design Center Place in Boston, dated as of 16 March 2022. Article X gives it the roof. Section 10.1(a) grants the right to install supplemental HVAC, an emergency generator, a satellite dish and antennas for the tenant’s communication network, for a term running to the end of the lease. No fee is named anywhere in the article. The rooftop is free.
Nineteen subsections later, the lease says what happens when the landlord wants its roof back for an afternoon:
“In the event that Landlord performs repairs to or replacement of the roof, Tenant shall, to the extent reasonably required, at Tenant’s cost, remove the Rooftop Equipment until such time as Landlord has completed such repairs or replacements."[1]
That is subsection (l). The landlord decides to re-roof, which is the landlord’s own capital decision about the landlord’s own building, and the tenant pays a rigger to lift its generator and its dishes off the deck and then pays again to put them back. The clause sets no cap, no notice period and no limit on how often it can happen. It does not even require the roof work to be necessary.
A commercial real estate team reading Article X for the rooftop grant will find a good one. The grant is not where the money is.
Five months apart, and one word#
The landlord at One Design Center Place is IDB 17-19 Drydock Limited Partnership. Half a mile away on the same street, in the Bronstein Building at 21, 23 and 25 Drydock Avenue, the landlord is IDB 21-25 Drydock Limited Partnership. Same sponsor, same complex, same form. On 10 August 2022, five months after the Entrada lease, that entity signed a second amendment with Ginkgo Bioworks that rewrites the rooftop article clause by clause, in the same order, with the same sentences.
Here is Entrada’s subsection (l) as Ginkgo’s subsection (xi):
“In the event that Landlord performs repairs to or replacement of the roof which require the removal or relocation of the 21 Drydock Rooftop Equipment, Tenant shall, to the extent reasonably required, at Landlord’s cost, remove or relocate the 21 Drydock Rooftop Equipment as required to enable Landlord to make such repairs or replacements."[1]
Everything after that sentence is identical in both documents, down to “Tenant recognizes that there may be an interference with Tenant’s use” and the landlord’s promise to use reasonable efforts to work promptly. Two changes carry the whole clause. “Tenant’s cost” becomes “Landlord’s cost.” And the trigger narrows: Entrada must clear the roof whenever the landlord performs roof repairs, while Ginkgo must do so only for repairs “which require the removal or relocation” of the equipment. Under Entrada’s version, a landlord re-roofing the far corner of the deck can still send the notice.
The relocation clause moved too. Entrada’s subsection (q) reads:
“Landlord shall have the right, upon no less than one-hundred eighty (180) days’ notice to Tenant, to require Tenant to relocate the Rooftop Area to another area (‘Relocated Rooftop Area’) on the roof of the Building suitable for the use of the Rooftop Equipment. In such event, Tenant shall, at Landlord’s cost and expense, on or before the ninetieth (90th) day after Landlord gives such notice, relocate all of its Rooftop Equipment from the Rooftop Area to the Relocation Rooftop Area."[1]
Read the two numbers together. The notice is 180 days. Performance is due on day 90. The deadline arrives three months before the notice period runs out, which means a tenant that treats 180 days as its planning horizon is in default on day 91. The defined term is also wrong twice over: the clause defines “Relocated Rooftop Area” and then requires relocation to the “Relocation Rooftop Area”, a term the Entrada lease never defines.
Ginkgo’s subsection (xvi) fixes all of it:
“Landlord shall have the right, upon one hundred twenty (120) days’ notice to Tenant, to require Tenant to relocate the 21 Drydock Rooftop Area to comparably functional space on another area (‘Relocation Rooftop Area’) on the roof of the Building suitable for the use of the 21 Drydock Rooftop Equipment."[1]
Notice drops to 120 days and performance is due on the 120th day, so the two numbers match. The replacement space has to be “comparably functional,” which Entrada’s version does not require. And the defined term is used consistently.
Then there is a subsection Entrada’s Article X does not contain at all. Ginkgo’s (iii):
“Tenant shall have no obligation to pay Base Rent or Additional Rent on account of Operating Costs and Taxes in respect of the 21 Drydock Rooftop Area."[1]
Entrada’s lease says the rooftop grant is free by saying nothing about price. Ginkgo’s says it in a sentence, which is a different thing, because Operating Costs and Taxes are measured against a share and a rentable area, and a rooftop area added to a premises definition in a future amendment is exactly the sort of square footage that shows up in a reconciliation. We have written before about rentable feet a tenant cannot occupy appearing in a remeasurement. Ginkgo closed that door; Entrada left it unmentioned.
Ginkgo also got the pathway written into the grant itself. Its rooftop right covers equipment and, “within the interior sections of walls and ceilings below the 21 Drydock Rooftop Area, wiring, cabling, piping, conduit and ductwork for connection to such installations and equipment”. Entrada’s grant covers the equipment on the roof and is silent about how the signal gets downstairs.
There is no case law behind any of this. There is one landlord’s form, two biotech tenants, five months, and a diff.
The grant is free in every document#
Ten filed documents were read for this post. Eight of them grant rooftop rights, and not one of those eight charges rent for it. MUFG Union Bank’s amended and restated lease at Union Bank Plaza, 445 South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, dated 2 August 2019, says it in the first line of Section 29.36:
“Tenant shall have the right during the Lease Term, at no rental fee, to operate and maintain its existing telecommunication equipment located on the roof of the Building as of the First Commencement Date (the ‘Existing Equipment’), and to the extent additional space is available from time to time on the roof of the Building, and subject to Landlord’s reasonable approval, to install, operate and maintain similar additional telecommunication equipment (‘New Equipment’)."[2]
Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ lease at 50 Northern Avenue on Fan Pier in Boston, dated 5 May 2011, goes further than free. Article 11 grants “the appurtenant and irrevocable (except upon the expiration or earlier termination of this Lease) rights at no additional rental charge, but otherwise subject to the terms and conditions of this Lease” to install and operate “certain equipment customarily installed on rooftops at Class A office and laboratory buildings in the City of Boston”.[3] Irrevocable and appurtenant is a property right, not a license, and it is the strongest grant in the set.
The rest simply name no number. Pegasystems, GRAIL, ACADIA and Entrada all have full rooftop articles with no fee in them.
This is not a sampling accident. Searches of the SEC EDGAR full-text index, re-run for this post on 23 October 2026, return six filings containing the exact phrase “rooftop license fee”, the most recent of them from 2013 and none since 1 January 2017. The phrase “riser management fee” returns none at all, ever. Meanwhile “Rooftop Equipment” is in 1,171 filings and “Rooftop License” in 108. The clause family is large and the priced version of it does not exist in the modern record.
So the negotiation is not about rent. It is about what happens afterwards, and there are three places it happens: the roof work, the interference, and the riser.
Who yields when two systems collide#
A rooftop grant is worth whatever it is worth on the day a second tenant puts a dish next to yours. No grant in the set is exclusive, and all of them contemplate the landlord licensing the same roof again. Pegasystems’ lease at 225 Wyman Street in Waltham, dated 6 July 2021, states it without qualification: “Tenant acknowledges that Landlord has granted and/or may grant lease rights, licenses, and other rights to various other tenants and occupants of the Building and to telecommunications service providers."[4]
What separates the documents is who has to switch off.
Two of them make the landlord police the roof on the tenant’s behalf. Union Bank Plaza, Section 29.36.5: “Landlord agrees that if any other tenant or occupant of the Building shall be permitted to cause similar equipment to be installed on the roof of the Building, such tenant or occupant shall covenant not to use its equipment so as to cause any interference with Tenant’s use of its Telecommunication Equipment."[2] That is a covenant about the contents of leases the landlord has not signed yet.
Vertex has the same mechanism, drafted tighter:
“Landlord shall provide in every other lease of space in the Building that permits rooftop access, and in every license or other agreement regarding use of the roof of the Building, (any of the foregoing, a ‘Rooftop Agreement’) that if such other tenant’s rooftop equipment interferes with Tenant’s Rooftop Equipment, such other tenant will remove or relocate its equipment as necessary to avoid such interference."[3]
Vertex then disclaims the landlord’s own responsibility for interference, but commits it to “use commercially reasonable efforts to (at no cost to Landlord) enforce Landlord’s rights under any Rooftop Agreements to prevent such interference.” It sends unresolved disputes to expedited arbitration. First installed wins, and the landlord is the enforcement mechanism.
Pegasystems sits at the other pole. Its Article XIII covers the tenant’s own wireless network inside the building, and the interference remedy runs one way:
“If the prohibited RFI is not eliminated within twenty-four (24) hours (or a shorter period if Landlord believes a shorter period to be appropriate) then, upon request from Landlord, Tenant shall shut down Tenant’s Communications Equipment pending resolution of the interference, with the exception of intermittent testing upon prior notice to and with the approval of Landlord."[4]
Twenty-four hours, shortened at the landlord’s belief about what is appropriate, and then the network goes off. There is no reciprocal obligation on whoever is causing the other half of the interference, and no finding required about who was there first. GRAIL’s lease at the Assembly Building in Durham, North Carolina, dated 4 June 2020, gives the landlord a shutdown right in an emergency on verbal notice alone.[4]
The difference between these two poles is not a matter of degree. A tenant with Vertex’s clause has a contractual answer to a new antenna on its roof. A tenant with Pegasystems’ clause has twenty-four hours and then silence.
The one approval clock in the set#
Harry Klaff of Avison Young and Craig Gillespie of Airtower Networks argued in Commercial Observer on 22 September 2026 that office tenants should negotiate cellular coverage as a lease issue rather than as an amenity, and that the drafting should include riser, pathway, rooftop and conduit access rights with a defined approval timeline attached. It is worth asking how many filed leases actually have one. Across the ten documents here, one does.
Pegasystems’ Section 11.1(j) is a self-executing approval procedure. The tenant sends a notice with all required materials and this written in capital letters on both the envelope and the letter: “FAILURE TO RESPOND TO THIS NOTICE WITHIN TWENTY DAYS SHALL RESULT IN THE DEEMED APPROVAL OF ROOFTOP LICENSE MATTER AFFECTING PEGASYSTEMS INC.‘S TENANCY AT 225 WYMAN STREET IN WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS.” Twenty days of silence, then a second notice carrying its own capitalized warning, and then:
“If Landlord does not respond to such second notice within five (5) Business Days after delivery to Landlord, then the consent required from Landlord with respect to such Rooftop License matter (but no other matter) shall be deemed given."[4]
Everywhere else, approval is a standard without a clock. Entrada’s subsection (r) says plan approval “will not be unreasonably withheld, conditioned or delayed,” which is the right standard and names no date. ACADIA’s antenna license at 210 Carnegie Center in Princeton, dated 15 May 2025, puts the location “to be approved by the Landlord in its sole discretion”. Reasonableness with no deadline and sole discretion with no deadline are closer to each other than they look, because both leave the tenant with a dispute instead of an installation.
The capitalized envelope is slightly ridiculous and it is also the only provision in the set that converts the landlord’s silence into a yes.
The roof you are not allowed to touch#
GRAIL’s rooftop clause solves restoration by forbidding the thing that would need restoring:
“Unless otherwise approved by Landlord in writing (in Landlord’s sole discretion), in no event shall Tenant be permitted to penetrate the roof membrane in connection with the installation or maintenance of the Rooftop Equipment."[4]
No penetrations means no patching at expiry, which removes a whole argument that other leases leave open. We have covered what a restoration clause takes back at the end of a term; here the landlord has pre-empted it by not letting the holes be made. The trade is that a dish has to be ballasted rather than bolted, and the tenant lives with whatever that allows.
Vertex takes the opposite route and regulates the penetration instead. Its tenant must engage “Landlord’s roofer (or another roofing contractor reasonably approved by Landlord and approved by Landlord’s roof manufacturer)” before any rooftop installation or repair, must “always comply with the roof warranty governing the protection of the roof and modifications to the roof.” It must obtain a letter from the roof manufacturer after the work confirming the warranty remains in effect, and must inspect the rooftop area twice a year at its own cost, correcting loose bolts and fittings.[3] That is a maintenance program, not a clause, and it is the price of an irrevocable grant.
GRAIL is also the only document in the set that splits roof work by cause rather than by party. Where the landlord performs Roof Work, the tenant cooperates “at Tenant’s sole cost and expense to the extent such Roof Work is due solely to Tenant’s Rooftop Equipment, but otherwise at Landlord’s cost and expense as an Operating Expense”, with thirty days’ notice except in an emergency.[4] Causation is the fair answer and it carries a sting: Landlord’s cost here means an Operating Expense, which is to say a pass-through, which is to say the tenant pays its share anyway. The base year and gross-up mechanics decide how much of it comes back.
Compare that with the 50% repair test deciding who buys a new rooftop HVAC unit. The question is the same question in both places, and the drafting answers it three ways: by party, by cause, or by pass-through.
Where the money actually went#
The roof is free. The riser is not.
Hippo Analytics’ lease at One Almaden Boulevard in San Jose, dated as of 24 April 2025, has no rooftop clause at all. The word rooftop does not appear in it. What it has is three sentences in the general provisions, under the heading “Riser Management Company”:
“Notwithstanding anything herein to the contrary, Landlord may require that Tenant utilize Landlord’s building riser management company in connection with any access to or installation of cabling and wiring in the vertical risers for the Building. Tenant shall pay any costs charged by the riser management company in connection with the installation of Tenant’s cabling and wiring. Landlord, at its option, may restrict access to the telephone closets of the Project and may exclude Tenant and its contractors from such telephone closets."[2]
A mandatory vendor the tenant does not choose, an obligation to pay whatever that vendor charges with no cap and no reasonableness standard, and an unqualified right to lock the tenant and its contractors out of the closets where its own cable terminates. Nothing in the clause requires the landlord to let the work happen at all.
The comparison that makes this sharp is that Hippo’s landlord is KBSIII Almaden Financial Plaza, LLC and MUFG Union Bank’s is KBSII 445 South Figueroa, LLC. Same sponsor, six years apart. The 2019 full-building lease lets its tenant use its share of existing riser space and construct new penetrations through the floors and ceilings of the telephone closets “for the Conduit Uses without charge for the use of such additional conduit and riser space”, and caps its rooftop footprint at “more than one-half (1/2) of the area of the Building roof available for its Telecommunication Equipment."[2] The 2025 suite lease gives the landlord the vendor, the price and the key.
Vivid Seats’ lease at 24 East Washington Street in Chicago, dated 21 December 2021, shows both halves inside one clause. Section 8.C gives the tenant its proportionate share of riser space “at no additional charge to Tenant”, and then routes the actual work through the landlord’s vendor: “Tenant shall pay directly to Landlord’s riser management service provider any charge imposed by said service provider in furnishing coordination services to Tenant (which charge shall be consistent with amounts charged to other tenants, generally, at the Building for similar services)."[5] The consistency qualifier is the only constraint on the number in any of these documents, and it benchmarks the charge against the landlord’s other tenants rather than against the market.
The same section reserves something no other document names: “Landlord’s right to charge certain access fees to Tenant’s telecommunications provider consistent with charges generally imposed by Landlord upon other tenants’ telecommunications providers at the Building”. The tenant’s carrier pays a toll to reach the tenant. That cost does not appear on the tenant’s rent statement and it does not stay with the carrier either.
This is the same shape as a landlord setting the hourly price of a building service and the unit it bills in. The grant is generous and free, and the delivery of it is sold through a channel the landlord controls.
Who is supposed to build the coverage#
The Klaff and Gillespie argument rests on a factual premise: carriers used to fund in-building cellular systems and have stopped, concentrating their capital on stadiums, airports and venues, which leaves the distributed antenna system as an unowned capital project in an office building.[6] The filed documents show landlords and tenants pushing that project back and forth without resolving it.
Vivid Seats’ landlord took it on, in Section 29.V, “Cellular Service”:
“Landlord, working in conjunction with one or more potential cellular service providers such a Verizon, AT&T or the like, shall commit to install, or cause to be installed, a Building DAS system, all within a reasonably practicable time frame."[5]
A promise to “commit to install” is not a promise to install. The deadline is “a reasonably practicable time frame”, which is no date. And four sentences later the same subsection says: “Landlord makes no representations or warranties whatsoever relative to the effectiveness or operational utility of any such DAS.” A promise with no date, no standard and an express disclaimer of whether the thing will work leaves the tenant with nothing to enforce and no way to measure a breach. The tenant’s own right is to connect its equipment to the building system once it exists, subject to every landlord approval right in the work letter.
The clearest allocation is in a work letter rather than a lease. The Column Group’s lease with HCP Oyster Point III at 171 Oyster Point Boulevard in South San Francisco, dated 6 September 2016, carries a base building matrix, and item 9 of the electrical scope reads: “Distributed Antenna System (DAS) consisting of head-end system, roof-mounted antenna, and 2” conduit risers in stair shafts. No coverage within Tenant premises."[5] The landlord funds the spine. The tenant’s column of the same matrix funds the supplementary system “as required to achieve city-required DAS signal coverage within Tenant premises,” itemized down to antenna repeaters, rated conduit, tie-in to the base building system, programming and jurisdictional testing.
Then the matrix says what the system is not for: “Please note that this system will NOT be used to amplify personal cellular services within the building.”
That sentence is the honest version of the whole problem. The system the landlord built and the tenant extended is an emergency responder radio system, installed because fire and life-safety code requires it, and it is scoped away from the thing the tenant’s staff will actually complain about. The code obligation and the commercial amenity share a riser, a head end and a budget line, and a tenant reading a base building matrix that says “Distributed Antenna System” will reasonably assume its phones will work.
The riser allocation two items down in the same matrix is the other half: “Sleeves for future conduit riser from IDF Rooms to the roof; Landlord approval required for use”. The pathway is built and the permission is not granted.
What the clause is worth on the day it matters#
The documents agree on the parts that read like negotiation and disagree on everything that costs money. Every rooftop grant in the set is free, none of them is exclusive, and all of them put the cost of installation and of repairing the tenant’s own damage on the tenant. The variables are: who pays when the landlord works on its own roof, who switches off when two systems interfere, whether the landlord has to bind future licensees, how long approval may take, and who owns the vendor standing between the tenant and its own cable.
The Entrada and Ginkgo pair is useful because it removes every explanation except leverage. Same sponsor, same street, same form, five months. One word in subsection (l), a trigger narrowed, 180/90 turned into 120/120, a rent carve-out added, and conduit rights written into the grant. Nobody litigated it and no court construed it. A tenant asked and got it.
What I could not find anywhere in the filed record is a coverage standard. Not one of these documents names a carrier, a signal strength threshold, a percentage of the premises, or a test methodology, and not one provides a remedy if the phones do not work. The access rights are drafted in detail and the outcome they exist to produce is not drafted at all.[6]
If you are a landlord, the roof-work subsection is where your form is probably doing more than you need it to. Entrada’s version lets you bill the tenant for clearing equipment during any roof repair, which reads like a win and in practice buys you an argument every time your roofer mobilizes. The causation split in GRAIL’s lease gets you the same protection with a narrower fight: the tenant pays where its equipment caused the work, you pay otherwise, and it runs through operating expenses. On interference, decide deliberately whether you will covenant to bind future rooftop licensees. Vertex’s version of that covenant obliges you only to include the term and to use commercially reasonable efforts at no cost to yourself, which is a defensible thing to give. And if you use a riser management vendor, know that an uncapped charge paired with a right to exclude the tenant from the telephone closets is the clause a tenant’s counsel will find and will not accept quietly.
If you are a tenant, read past the grant. Three questions decide what the rooftop article is worth: who pays when the landlord re-roofs, who switches off when a second system arrives, and how long the landlord may take to approve your plans. Ask for the trigger to be narrowed to roof work that actually requires moving your equipment, ask for relocation notice and performance deadlines that are the same number, and check for a sentence saying no Base Rent or Operating Costs are payable on the rooftop area. If the building has a riser management company, ask who it is, what it charged the last tenant, and whether the charge is capped or benchmarked. Then ask the questions the leases do not answer: which carriers work in the space today, who measured it and how, who owns the in-building system, and what happens when a carrier decommissions the technology your ten-year lease is about to outlive.
How many of your leases name a coverage standard?#
Rooftop and riser rights sit in the back of the document, in an article a review often reaches last. The grant looks the same in every form, and the five subsections that decide the cost do not. Acrebase reads the whole article rather than the grant, surfaces the roof-work cost allocation, the interference remedy, the approval timeline and the riser vendor terms across a portfolio, and shows you which of your leases say “at Tenant’s cost” where your playbook says they should not. When your team negotiates the next one, the fallback positions your counsel already approved are in the draft, with the language from the deal where you last won the point.
Footnotes
[1] Lease Agreement between IDB 17-19 DRYDOCK LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, as Landlord, and ENTRADA THERAPEUTICS, INC., as Tenant, for the fifth and sixth floors of One Design Center Place, Boston, Massachusetts, made and entered into as of March 16, 2022. Filed as Exhibit 10.14 to Entrada’s Form 10-K, accession 0001689375-24-000016: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1689375/000168937524000016/ex1014entrada-idbleaseagre.htm The same lease was filed earlier at accession 0001104659-22-036320 with different pagination; Article X is identical in both. Article X, Section 10.1 runs through subsections (a) to (s). The roof work provision is (l), relocation is (q), plan approval is (r), and 24-hour access is (g). A page number “48” sits in the filed text immediately before subsection (l) and has been removed from the quotation. Subsection (f) is incomplete as filed: it opens “Tenant shall have no right to make any changes, alterations, signs, decoration or other improvements (which changes, alterations, signs, decoration or other improvements to the Rooftop Area” and then runs on with words missing and the parenthesis never closed. The gap appears identically in both separately typeset filings, and the Ginkgo document below carries the intact version of the same sentence, so it is in the public record rather than an artifact of conversion. The cover page and Section 2.1 give the address as One Design Center Place while the Section 11.1 definition of Building says “One Design Place.”
Second Amendment to Lease between IDB 21-25 DRYDOCK LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, as Landlord, and GINKGO BIOWORKS, INC., as Tenant, for the Bronstein Building at 21, 23 and 25 Drydock Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, made as of the 10th day of August, 2022, amending an Original Lease dated as of March 18, 2016 and a First Amendment dated as of August 13, 2018. Filed as Exhibit 10.4 to Ginkgo’s Form 10-Q, accession 0000950170-22-017412: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1830214/000095017022017412/dna-ex10_4.htm Section 6 is headed “21 Drydock Rooftop Installations; Relocation” and its subsection 6(b) runs (i) to (xviii). Two cross-reference problems: 6(b) opens “subject to … the terms and conditions of this Section 5,” but it is Section 6, and Section 5 of the amendment is Tenant’s Proportionate Share. And 6(a) deletes Section 10 of the First Amendment while preserving “Tenant’s rooftop rights set forth in Section 2.1(B) of the Original Lease”, which is not filed, so that provision cannot be read.
[2] Amended and Restated Office Lease between KBSII 445 SOUTH FIGUEROA, LLC, as Landlord, and MUFG UNION BANK, N.A., as Tenant, for Union Bank Plaza, 445 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, California, dated August 2, 2019. Filed as Exhibit 10.2 to KBS Real Estate Investment Trust II’s Form 10-Q, accession 0001411059-19-000062: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1411059/000141105919000062/kbsriiq32019exhibit102.htm Section 29.36 is Telecommunication Equipment and runs to 29.36.8; the interference covenant is 29.36.5 and the roof area cap is 29.36.8. The riser and conduit rights are in Section 1.1 under the defined term Conduit Uses. Section 29.36.2 reads “shall-be the responsibility of Tenant” in the filed text, with a hyphen where a space belongs, and page numbers “- 89 -” and “- 90 -” sit inside the Section 29.36 text and have been removed from the quotations.
Office Lease between KBSIII ALMADEN FINANCIAL PLAZA, LLC, as Landlord, and HIPPO ANALYTICS INC., as Tenant, for Suite 400 at One Almaden Boulevard, San Jose, California, dated as of April 24, 2025 (the filed text carries a space before the comma). Filed as Exhibit 10.2 to KBS Real Estate Investment Trust III’s Form 10-Q, accession 0001828105-25-000036: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1828105/000182810525000036/exhibit102officelease-hi.htm The Riser Management Company provision is subsection (gg) of the general provisions article, sitting between (ff) on CASp inspections and (hh) on energy disclosures.
[3] Lease between FIFTY NORTHERN AVENUE LLC, as Landlord, and VERTEX PHARMACEUTICALS INCORPORATED, as Tenant, for 50 Northern Avenue (Parcel A, Fan Pier), Boston, Massachusetts. Section 1.01 gives the Date of Lease as May 5, 2011. It reaches the public record as Exhibit 10.2 to Vertex’s Form 10-Q, accession 0000875320-21-000027, filed 30 July 2021, more than ten years after the lease date: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/875320/000087532021000027/a2021q210-qexhibit102.htm Article 11 is Rooftop License; Antennas, running from 11.01 to 11.04. Section 11.03 sends unresolved interference disputes to expedited AAA arbitration before a Boston arbitrator, to be decided within ten days of appointment. Section 11.04 limits the landlord’s relocation right to a good faith determination that the upper penthouse roof is needed for retail and restaurant tenants, requires comparably functional replacement space and makes that space subject to the tenant’s approval, not to be unreasonably withheld. The companion lease for 11 Fan Pier Boulevard between Eleven Fan Pier Boulevard LLC and Vertex, also dated May 5, 2011, was filed the same day as Exhibit 10.3 with identical Article 11 text, which establishes this as the sponsor’s form rather than a one-off.
[4] Lease between 275 WYMAN LLC, as Landlord, and PEGASYSTEMS INC., as Tenant, for 225 Wyman Street, Waltham, Massachusetts, dated July 6, 2021 (the filed text carries a space before the comma). Filed as Exhibit 10.1 to Pegasystems’ Form 8-K, accession 0001013857-21-000163: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1013857/000101385721000163/q22021_8kxwalthamxex101.htm Article XI is Roof Space, with Section 11.1 the antenna and Rooftop License provisions; Article XIII is Tenant’s Wireless Network, and the radio frequency interference provision is 13.1(c). The grant is limited to “an antenna no more than thirty-six inches (36”) in diameter” plus one two-inch conduit, and 11.1(h) confines the license to serving “the communication needs of Tenant within the Building.” Section 11.1(h) directs removal “in accordance with the provisions of subsection (h) hereof” from within subsection (h) itself; the removal mechanics are in (i), so the cross-reference does not resolve.
Lease Agreement between PP OFFICE OWNER 1, L.P., as Landlord, and GRAIL, INC., as Tenant, for the Assembly Building, 4001 E. NC Hwy. 54, Durham, North Carolina, executed this 4th day of June, 2020. Filed as Exhibit 10.24 to GRAIL’s Form S-1, accession 0001193125-24-148672: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1699031/000119312524148672/d556103dex1024.htm Section 16.20 is Rooftop Rights, subsections (a) to (e). The no-penetration rule is 16.20(b)(i), the Roof Work cost allocation is 16.20(c), and the emergency shutdown right on verbal notice is 16.20(d). A page number “49” sits inside the 16.20(b)(ii) text in the filed document. The ACADIA Pharmaceuticals antenna license referred to in the body is Section 44 of the lease between 210 ASSOCIATES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP and ACADIA PHARMACEUTICALS INC. for 210 Carnegie Center, Princeton, New Jersey, dated as of May 15, 2025, filed as Exhibit 10.2 at accession 0000950170-25-104295; it states that the license “is not exclusive,” conditions the grant on no Event of Default and no history of recurring defaults in the preceding twelve months, and permits one antenna.
[5] Office Lease between BSREP II SS CHICAGO LLC, as Landlord, and VIVID SEATS LLC, as Tenant, for 24 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois, executed as of the 21st day of December, 2021. The execution date appears in the filed text with the form’s underscores still around the typed entries. Filed as Exhibit 10.1 to Vivid Seats’ Form 8-K, accession 0000950170-21-005329: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1856031/000095017021005329/seat-ex10_1.htm Section 8.C covers riser and telephone closet access, Section 29.V is Cellular Service, and Section 35 is the satellite and antenna provision. Section 29.V reads “such a Verizon” in the filed text where “such as Verizon” is meant, and the quotation reproduces it. Section 35 makes the antenna right expire unless the tenant delivers a Satellite Notice by the Turnover Date and installs by the last day of the first lease year. Relocation under it is at the landlord’s expense, but only where the tenant’s equipment disrupts equipment “that was existing prior to the installation of Tenant’s telecommunications equipment,” which is a last-in-yields rule and the mirror image of the Union Bank Plaza covenant discussed in the body.
Lease between HCP OYSTER POINT III LLC, as Landlord, and THE COLUMN GROUP, LLC, as Tenant, for 171 Oyster Point Boulevard, South San Francisco, California, with a Section 1 Date of September 6, 2016. The tenant named on this exhibit is not the filer; it reaches the public record as Exhibit 10.10 to Tenaya Therapeutics’ Form S-1, accession 0001193125-21-212010: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1858848/000119312521212010/d175698dex1010.htm The DAS allocation is in the base building and tenant improvement matrix attached to the work letter, under the electrical and telephone/data headings. The work letter’s own exhibits are not filed, so the specifications behind the matrix line items cannot be read.
[6] On sources and method. These ten documents were found through SEC EDGAR full text search at efts.sec.gov, which indexes filings from 2001 onward, and every quotation in this post was checked against the stripped text of the filing itself rather than against a search result snippet. The useful lesson is that the subject words are useless: “Telecommunications Equipment,” “Communications Equipment” and “distributed antenna system” all return more filings than the index will count, and “DAS” additionally matches Spanish and German text. What finds the clause is the defined term for the equipment and the money, so “Rooftop Equipment” (1,171 filings, 506 since 2017), “Rooftop License” (108 and 35) and “Riser Management” (186 and 75) are the productive queries. The two zero results quoted in the body are themselves findings, and they are why this post makes no claim about the price of a rooftop: in the filed record there is not one. “Building access agreement” returns seventy filings, almost all about construction site access, because the carrier-side building access agreement is not the kind of document a public company files. The tenant-side lease is the only place to look.
Three limits. The ten documents were chosen because they disagree with each other and not as a sample of any market, and all of them were filed because they were material to a public company, which concentrates them in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Jose, Princeton, Durham and South San Francisco and in tenants with dense headcounts. Two of them are considerably older than their filing dates, which matters: the Vertex lease is from 2011 and the Column Group lease from 2016, so neither speaks to current practice on carrier funding, and the Column Group matrix in particular predates the shift this post is about. And I found no filed document in the set stating a cellular coverage standard, a signal threshold, a named carrier or a remedy for coverage failure, so the claim in the body is about what the filed corpus contains rather than about what is being negotiated privately today.
The commentary is thin and worth being precise about. Harry Klaff and Craig Gillespie, “Office Tenants Should Negotiate Cell Coverage Like a Lease Issue,” Commercial Observer, 22 September 2026, is the one dated, attributable piece on this clause family published between 1 August and 23 October 2026: https://commercialobserver.com/2026/09/cell-coverage-office-tenantw/ It is a column rather than reporting, and the authors are the US president of Avison Young and the chief executive of an in-building wireless firm, so the argument that carriers have withdrawn funding is also a commercial pitch; Gillespie published the same thesis in Propmodo on 5 August 2025. The drafting checklist it sets out is a good one, but this post is built on the leases rather than on the column. No law firm has written a client alert on tenant-side rooftop and riser access rights in that window. What exists is vendor material and two Bisnow pieces from 2018 that carry 2026 modification dates and are sponsored by in-building wireless companies. No 2025 or 2026 FCC proceeding reaches this clause family either: the live item is the Build America wireless siting docket, and its Federal Register text never mentions in-building systems, risers or multiple tenant environments.
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