Codiak BioSciences leased 4 Hartwell Place in Lexington, Massachusetts from King 4 Hartwell Place, LLC, with an execution date of 5 March 2019. It is a lab building, about 40,123 rentable square feet, and the surrender clause lists what has to come out at the end: all of the tenant’s property, “all autoclaves and cage washers and, to the extent specified by Landlord, Alterations made by Tenant”.
A cage washer is a piece of plumbed, hard-wired equipment the size of a walk-in closet. Decommissioning one is a scheduled job with a contractor and a crane window. On its own that is just a surrender obligation, the same family of clause as what a restoration clause takes back at the end of a term, and a tenant that misses it expects to be billed for the work.
Section 21.3 is the holdover clause, and it opens by defining holding over to include that job going wrong:
“If any of the Tenant Parties holds over (which term shall include, without limitation, the failure of Tenant or any Tenant Party to perform all of its obligations under Section 21.1 above) after the end of the Term, Tenant shall be deemed a tenant-at-sufferance subject to the provisions of this Lease."[1]
So the tenant can be out of the building, keys handed back, and still be holding over, because the cage washer is still bolted to the floor. The price of that is 150% of Base Rent for thirty days and 200% after, except that the multiple is not applied to the rent the tenant was last paying. It is applied to “the highest rate of Base Rent payable during the Term,” which in a lease with ten years of annual escalations means the last year’s number. On Codiak’s rent schedule, Lease Year 10 runs at $95,599.54 a month, so the first month of holdover is $143,399.31 and the second is $191,199.08, and all Additional Rent continues on top at face value.
That is the part of the clause a tenant can calculate. Thirty-one days later the clause stops being arithmetic.
The tail that nobody prices#
Codiak’s holdover clause has three numbered obligations. The first two are rent. The third is this:
“(iii) in the event such hold over extends beyond sixty (60) days after the end of the Term, Tenant shall be liable for all damages, including without limitation lost business and consequential damages, incurred by Landlord as a result of such holding over”
Sixty days is a grace period in the sense that an unexploded shell is safe. Up to day 60 the exposure is a known monthly figure. From day 61 it is whatever the landlord’s next deal was worth, and the clause supplies the landlord’s theory of the case in advance: the tenant “acknowledging that Landlord may need the Premises after the end of the Term for other tenants and that the damages which Landlord may suffer as the result of Tenant’s holding over cannot be determined as of the Execution Date.”
Nine filed documents were read for this post, and on the headline number they are nearly unanimous. Eight of the nine step up, almost all of them from 150% to 200%, and the only real variation is where the step sits: thirty days in four of them, one month in another, ninety days in two, six months in one. The number is settled practice. What is not settled, and what moves the exposure by orders of magnitude, is what sits behind the number.
Who pays for the lease the landlord could not deliver#
PubMatic signed an office lease with BRE/NYT L.L.C. dated 22 August 2014 for space at 229 West 43rd Street in New York. Its Article 21 is split in two, and the split is the whole point. Section 21.01 is called Holdover Rent and does the familiar thing:
“Tenant shall pay an amount equal to 150% of the Base Rent for the first thirty (30) days beyond the Termination Date, and thereafter an amount equal to 200% of the sum of the Base Rent plus any Additional Rent due for the period immediately preceding the holdover."[2]
Read the two tiers carefully, because they are not the same clause twice with a bigger number. The 150% tier is a multiple of Base Rent. The 200% tier is a multiple of Base Rent plus Additional Rent. In a New York building where operating expenses and taxes run at a meaningful fraction of base, crossing day 31 roughly triples the monthly charge rather than increasing it by a third.
Then Section 21.02, Holdover Damages, builds a machine:
“Tenant shall be subject not only to summary proceedings and all direct damages related thereto, but also, to any damages arising out of any new leases or lost opportunities by Landlord to re-let the Premises (or any part thereof)”
The clause then defines the instrument of the tenant’s liability: “In the event that Landlord shall enter into one or more leases for all or any portion of the Premises (any such lease is herein called a ‘Holdover Lease’)”. If there is a Holdover Lease, the tenant is liable for the damages from the landlord’s “inability to deliver the premises leased pursuant to such Holdover Lease to the tenant under such Holdover Lease.”
And the last sentence of the article tells the tenant how it will arrive:
“All damages to Landlord by reason of such holding over by Tenant may be the subject of a separate action and need not be asserted by Landlord in any summary proceedings against Tenant.”
Which is to say the eviction and the damages claim are different lawsuits, the second one does not have to be mentioned during the first, and a tenant that settles the possession case has settled nothing. There is no cap in Article 21 and no grace period anywhere in it. Day one of a holdover at 229 West 43rd Street is day one of exposure to someone else’s lease.
The two leases that say no#
In the whole set, one landlord wrote the opposite. First Industrial, L.P. signed two ground leases on 4 September 2008 covering the east and west halves of 2175 Cactus Road in San Diego, one with ADESA San Diego, LLC and one with ADESA California, LLC, both guaranteed by KAR Holdings. Twenty-year terms, both ending 30 September 2028. The holdover provision sits unlabeled at the end of Section 19, the surrender section, and the text is identical in both documents:
“(i) Tenant shall be deemed a tenant-at-will; (ii) Tenant shall pay the Holdover Percentage (as defined below) multiplied by the aggregate of all Rent last prevailing hereunder, and also shall pay all actual damages (but not incidental, consequential, punitive, special or other similarly speculative damages) sustained by Landlord, directly by reason of Tenant’s remaining in possession after the expiration or termination of this Lease; (iii) there shall be no renewal or extension of this Lease by operation of law; and (iv) the tenancy-at-will may be terminated by either party hereto upon 30 days’ prior written notice given by the terminating party to the non-terminating party."[3]
Three things in one sentence that no other document in the set does together. Consequential damages are excluded by name, along with incidental, punitive and special damages. The multiple applies once to “the aggregate of all Rent”, so there is no argument about base versus additional. And the tenancy is a tenancy-at-will terminable “by either party,” which gives the holding-over tenant a thirty-day exit of its own rather than leaving it at sufferance.
The multiples are also the lowest found: “(A) during the first ninety (90) days after the Termination Date, 125% or (B) from and after ninety-one (91) days after the Termination Date, 150%.”
It would be easy to read that as a well-advised tenant winning the point. The document type is the better explanation. These are ground leases, and the tenant owns the buildings. Section 1.5 of each describes roughly 39 acres of land “on which certain buildings and other improvements, all of which are (and, during the Term, as defined below, shall be) owned by Tenant, are located”. A landlord of raw ground has no incoming tenant waiting to take delivery of a vehicle auction facility it does not own, so the lost-deal damages that Article 21 of the PubMatic lease is built to capture do not exist here. The clause that looks generous is the clause where the landlord had nothing to lose.
A grace period, or a notice, or neither#
Two documents put a gate in front of the consequential damages instead of granting or excluding them outright, and they chose different gates.
Codiak’s gate is time: sixty days, and nothing else. No notice is required, the landlord need not have a replacement tenant, and nothing the tenant does on day 59 stops the clock.
CrowdStrike’s lease with EQC Capitol Tower Property LLC for Suite 1400 at 206 East 9th Street in Austin, dated 20 April 2018, uses two gates at once. Consequential damages arrive only if the landlord “is unable to deliver possession of the Premises to a new tenant or to perform improvements for a new tenant as a result of Tenant’s holdover and Tenant fails to vacate the Premises within 15 days after written notice from Landlord”.[4] The landlord has to have a real frustrated deal, and it has to tell the tenant to get out and wait fifteen days. That is the closest thing in the set to the standard a tenant-side brokerage recommends asking for, which is no consequential damages “unless landlord has a signed replacement lease”.[5]
CrowdStrike also bought something nobody else in the set has: a holdover it is allowed to have. Section 22 gives it a one-time right to extend the term by thirty, sixty or ninety days, priced at Additional Rent plus 125% of Base Rent, against 150% then 200% of Base Rent and Additional Rent together if it holds over without the right. On the last month of the filed rent schedule, $80,877.17, the permitted track costs $101,096.46 of base rent a month and the second unpermitted tier costs $161,754.34.
The catch is the notice. The Holdover Notice is due “no later than twelve (12) months before the then current Termination Date of the Term, time being of the essence.” It is also unavailable if a Material Default exists. A tenant has to know a year ahead that its new building will not be ready, which is a year before most of the things that cause a holdover have happened. The cheap option expires long before the tenant learns it needs one.
The one clause that caps the landlord#
SSB Realty LLC, the real estate arm of State Street, took One Lincoln Street in Boston from Kingston Bedford Joint Venture LLC under a lease dated 9 May 2001. Section 20.17 is the only holdover clause in the set that limits what the landlord can collect, and it limits two different things.
It starts hard. Holding over “shall, under no circumstances, give rise to any type of tenancy”, payments are “for use and occupancy only”, and the charge runs at the Applicable Holdover Percentage of Annual Fixed Rent plus the full amount of Additional Rent, or of Fair Market Rent, “at the greater of” those two. A holdover into a rising market is priced at the market, not at the expiring deal. The percentage is 150% for the first six months, the longest first tier found anywhere, and 200% after.
Then it gives two things back:
“Landlord specifically agrees to stay the execution of any court order providing for delivery of possession of the Premises to Landlord until the expiration of the first nine (9) months of any such holdover."[6]
The landlord can win the possession case and has promised not to enforce the judgment for nine months. Alongside it, the landlord waives actual damages above the holdover charge for the same nine months, on the stated basis that holdover damages “are difficult to ascertain” and that the section “reflect a reasonable estimate of Landlord’s damages.”
For a bank with a trading floor in the building, nine months of priced, enforceable, un-evictable occupancy is the thing worth having. It is also the clause that explains who gets this: the tenant of a whole tower, negotiating before it is built.
What happens at month ten is written with some care:
“From and after the expiration of such nine (9) month period, actual damages may be recovered in addition to the Applicable Holdover Percentage of Annual Fixed Rent and Additional Rent, or Fair Market Rent, as the case may be, including any damages accruing from and after the expiration of such nine (9) month period relating to any loss, cost or damage, whether first incurred prior to the expiration of such period or thereafter.”
The last clause is the one to read twice. After month nine the landlord can recover damages accruing later that relate to a loss “first incurred” earlier. The cap suspends the claim; it does not retire it.
Liquidated damages, not liquidated damages, or a penalty#
Three documents in the set take three different positions on what the holdover charge legally is, and the positions are stated in flat terms that cannot be reconciled.
One Lincoln Street says the payments “shall be considered to be liquidated damages and not a penalty.”
Madrigal Pharmaceuticals’ lease with Four Tower Bridge Associates for Four Tower Bridge at 200 Barr Harbor Drive in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, entered into as of 10 January 2019, ends its holdover clause the other way: “In no way shall the remedies to Landlord set forth above be construed to constitute liquidated damages for Landlord’s losses resulting from Tenant’s holdover."[7]
And a 2025 sublease of 1600 Sierra Point Parkway in Brisbane, California, from Janssen Research & Development to Nurix Therapeutics, says the thing landlords’ counsel normally spend a sentence denying: “The parties acknowledge that the foregoing holdover percentage constitutes a contractual penalty."[8]
These are not drafting moods. The characterization decides what else the landlord can ask for. A charge that is liquidated damages is the measure of the loss, which is why One Lincoln Street had to waive actual damages separately and only for nine months. A charge that is expressly not liquidated damages leaves the actual loss fully claimable on top, which is what Madrigal’s clause is for. A charge the parties agree is a penalty is the one most exposed if anyone ever tests it, which may be why it appears in a sublease between two counterparties with a redacted percentage rather than in a landlord’s form.
The characterization can also matter for reasons that have nothing to do with contract law. In a medical office building the same multiple runs into a federal statute, and we have looked before at a holdover premium in a physician lease that fails Stark whether the landlord charges it or waives it. None of the nine documents here is a healthcare lease, so none of them has that problem. They do all share the assumption underneath it, which is that a number everyone calls a deterrent is still supposed to look like rent.
Madrigal’s clause is worth reading for what else it reaches. The multiple is 150% for the first month and 200% after, applied to Rent, “without prorating for any partial month of holdover, and except that any provisions in this Lease that limit the amount or defer the payment of Additional Rent are null and void.” The lease has a two-month abatement period and a base year. Holding over switches off every concession in the document, retroactively in effect, by voiding the provisions that created them. Then it takes the renewal rights: “any and all options to extend this Lease or expand the Premises shall be deemed terminated and of no further effect as of the first date that Tenant holds over.”
A tenant holding over for a month while its new space is finished has, on the first day, lost the right to stay. That is a strange result for a clause whose stated purpose is to get the tenant out. It also sits oddly next to the renewal machinery elsewhere in the same document, where an option to renew is normally lost only by missing a notice deadline that the tenant can at least diarize.
The Madrigal lease has one more oddity, and it is in the filing rather than the drafting. The same lease reached the public record twice. In the version filed in April 2019 the two percentages are simply absent: the clause reads “(i) [ ] for the first month of holdover; and (ii) [ ] for any period of holdover beyond 1 month”, with four blank spaces inside each bracket, no omission marker and no confidentiality legend anywhere in the exhibit. The version filed in 2025 carries the numbers. Whatever happened in 2019, the two numbers that set the holdover price were the only thing in the document left blank.
Why this clause gets litigated by accident#
Holdover is not usually a strategy. Writing in Lawyer Monthly on 15 September 2026, Matt Johnson puts the common case plainly: “A build-out runs late, a permit does not arrive, and a tenant with nowhere to go accrues penalty rent through no particular fault."[9] His read on the multiple is that it is “a deterrent rather than a valuation, and it is usually enforceable as drafted.”
The two sides of that sentence usually belong to two different landlords. A tenant holds over because the building it is moving into was handed over late, and whether its outgoing lease charges 150% or 200% has nothing to do with what its incoming lease pays it for the delay. Those are the clauses that ought to be read against each other, and in practice they are drafted a year apart by different firms. A late delivery termination right that expires ten business days after it arises is worth very little to a tenant whose old landlord has a Holdover Lease signed for the space it is sitting in, and a daily free-rent credit against the new lease is not denominated in anything like the same units as 200% of the old one plus consequential damages.
The deterrent theory is the right way to see the headline number and the wrong way to see the rest of the clause. A deterrent priced at 200% of a known rent is a decision a tenant can make: it costs this much to stay a month, and staying is worth it or it is not. None of the consequential damages provisions work that way. Codiak cannot price day 61 because the number depends on a lease it has never seen. PubMatic cannot price day one. The deterrent is legible and the actual exposure is not, which is the opposite of how a liquidated sum is supposed to behave.
It also matters more in 2026 than it did two years ago. Cushman & Wakefield’s Q3 2026 US office MarketBeat, published 14 October 2026, puts national office vacancy at 19.8%, down 30 basis points year over year, with a fifth consecutive quarter of positive net absorption and sublease availability under 89 million square feet for the first time since 2020.[10] A landlord in a market with falling vacancy and thin sublease supply is more likely to have a signed replacement tenant behind a departing one, and a signed replacement tenant is the fact that converts a holdover from a rent question into a damages claim. That is a judgment about where the risk is heading rather than something the filed leases say; the leases were drafted in 2001, 2008, 2014, 2018 and 2019 and do not know what year it is.
If you are a landlord, decide which of two clauses you are writing, because the set shows people writing both without noticing. If the holdover charge is your remedy, say it is liquidated damages, keep the multiple defensible, and accept that you have given up the lost-deal claim. If the charge is a floor, say so the way Four Tower Bridge did and leave actual damages open. What you should not do is take the One Lincoln Street structure and delete the nine-month cap, because a court looking at a stated liquidated sum plus unlimited actual damages plus a penalty-sounding multiple is being invited to test the whole thing. The gate CrowdStrike’s landlord accepted costs you almost nothing worth having: if you have a frustrated replacement deal you can prove it, and fifteen days’ notice to a tenant you want out is a thing you were going to do anyway.
If you are a tenant, negotiate the tail before the multiple. The multiple is standard, nearly everyone pays 150% then 200%, and fighting it wins you a few weeks of margin. Three asks are worth more. First, put a gate on consequential damages: a real frustrated replacement lease, plus notice and a short cure, which is the CrowdStrike formulation and the one the tenant brokers recommend. Second, check what the multiple is applied to. “Highest rate of Base Rent payable during the Term” is not the rent you are paying, a 200% tier that quietly adds Additional Rent into the multiplied base is not the same clause as the 150% tier above it, and a greater-of-Fair-Market-Rent floor turns your overstay into a market deal. Third, read your surrender clause and your holdover clause together: if holdover is defined to include failing to remove your equipment, your removal schedule is a rent schedule. Then ask for the thing CrowdStrike has, a priced permitted holdover, and ask for the notice deadline to be thirty days before expiration rather than twelve months, because a holdover you can see coming a year out is not the one you will have.
How many of your leases turn a late move-out into a damages claim?#
The holdover clause is usually two paragraphs near the surrender provisions, and most lease reviews check the percentage and move on. The percentage is the part that does not vary. Acrebase reads the rest: what the multiple is applied to, whether consequential and lost-business damages are granted, excluded or gated, whether a grace period or a notice stands in front of them, whether holding over is defined to include your removal obligations, and what it costs you in renewal options and rent concessions on the first day. Across a portfolio that produces a list of which buildings you can afford to be late in and which you cannot, and when your team negotiates the next one, the gate language your counsel already approved is in the draft, with the version from the deal where you last got it.
Footnotes
[1] Lease between KING 4 HARTWELL PLACE, LLC, as Landlord, and CODIAK BIOSCIENCES, INC., as Tenant, for 4 Hartwell Place, Lexington, Massachusetts, Execution Date March 5, 2019. Filed as Exhibit 10.11 to Codiak’s Form S-1, accession 0001193125-20-242253: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1659352/000119312520242253/d27892dex1011.htm Section 21.1 is Surrender and 21.3 is Holdover; the autoclave and cage washer removal obligation is 21.1(a)(ii). The clause is internally inconsistent about its own defined term: subsection (i) refers to “the Holdover Percentage, as hereinafter defined,” and the term defined two sentences later is “Hold Over Percentage,” two different strings. The rent figures come from the Base Rent table on the Lease Summary Sheet, which runs Lease Year 1 at $73,269.08 a month, marked annualized, to Lease Year 10 at $95,599.54. The holdover arithmetic in the body assumes the tenant reaches Lease Year 10, which is the only reading on which “the highest rate of Base Rent payable during the Term” is that figure. Operating costs and taxes are charged separately under Sections 5.2 and 5.3 and are not in the monthly numbers quoted.
[2] Office Lease Agreement between BRE/NYT L.L.C., as Landlord, and PUBMATIC, INC., as Tenant, for space at 229 West 43rd Street, New York, New York, made and entered into as of the 22nd day of August, 2014. It reaches the public record more than six years later as Exhibit 10.18 to PubMatic’s Form S-1, accession 0001628280-20-016438: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1422930/000162828020016438/exhibit1018-sx1.htm Article 21 is Holding Over, with Section 21.01 Holdover Rent and Section 21.02 Holdover Damages. A page number “38” sits inside the second sentence of 21.02 in the filed text, between “and, if” and “Tenant shall hold-over”, and the quotation of the Holdover Lease definition stops before it. The building is a condominium unit under a 2011 declaration, so the landlord’s own delivery obligations to a successor tenant run through the Condominium Documents as well as the lease.
[3] Ground Lease (East 39 Acres at San Diego, California) between First Industrial, L.P., as Landlord, and ADESA San Diego, LLC, as Tenant, Effective Date of Lease September 4, 2008, filed as Exhibit 10.3, and Ground Lease (West 39 Acres at San Diego, California) between First Industrial, L.P. and ADESA California, LLC, same effective date, filed as Exhibit 10.4. Both are exhibits to KAR Holdings, Inc.’s Form S-1, accession 0001193125-08-192989: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1395942/000119312508192989/dex103.htm and https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1395942/000119312508192989/dex104.htm The holdover text is word for word identical in the two documents and sits at the end of Section 19, which is otherwise about surrender and includes an obligation to remove “all motor vehicles of any nature whatsoever”. Both are twenty-year terms ending September 30, 2028, both guaranteed by KAR Holdings, and both describe improvements owned by the tenant rather than the landlord, which is the reading the body relies on. The Holdover Percentage definition in Exhibit 10.4 carries a space before the comma in the Section 1.6 cross-reference list, an artifact of the filing.
[4] Office Lease Agreement between EQC CAPITOL TOWER PROPERTY LLC, as Landlord, and CROWDSTRIKE, INC., as Tenant, for Suite 1400, 206 East 9th Street, Austin, Texas, known as Capitol Tower, made and entered into as of April 20, 2018. Filed as Exhibit 10.18 to CrowdStrike’s Form 10-K, accession 0001535527-22-000006: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1535527/000153552722000006/ex-1018_crowdstrikeaustinl.htm Section 22 is Holding Over and defines both the Permitted Holdover Period and the Unpermitted Holdover Period; the filed text reads “Tenant shall pay shall pay” in the permitted-track sentence, which is in the original and is left out of the quotations. Both tracks price “on a per month basis without reduction for partial months” and both strip out any rent abatement the tenant was entitled to. Section 1.03 gives the Base Rent schedule, which runs 73 months from $67,738.13 a month at $31.50 per square foot to $80,877.17 at $37.61, on 25,805 rentable square feet; the figures in the body are 125%, 150% and 200% of that last month.
[5] “Commercial Lease Red Flags: 15 Terms to Watch Before You Sign,” Hughes Marino, 15 October 2026: https://hughesmarino.com/new-york/blog/2026/10/15/commercial-lease-red-flags-15-terms-to-watch-before-you-sign/ Red Flag #12 is Extreme Holdover Rent Penalties, and the negotiating table at the end of the piece sets the tenant ask at 100 to 125% of base rent for 60 to 90 days with no consequential damages absent a signed replacement lease. Hughes Marino is a tenant representation brokerage, so this is an advocacy document rather than neutral commentary, and it is quoted here as the tenant-side position it is. It carries a house byline with no individual author.
[6] Lease between KINGSTON BEDFORD JOINT VENTURE LLC, as Landlord, and SSB REALTY LLC, as Tenant, for premises at One Lincoln Street, Boston, Massachusetts, Date May 9, 2001 per Section 1.2. The tenant is not the filer; it reaches the public record fourteen years later as Exhibit 10.7 to ETRE REIT, LLC’s registration statement, accession 0001575438-15-000013: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1575438/000157543815000013/exhibit107lse.htm Section 20.17 is Holding Over. The building did not exist when the lease was signed, which is why Article 4 is about base building construction and Section 3.4 sets steel erection outside dates. The First Amendment of August 15, 2003, filed as Exhibit 10.8 in the same accession, has a section headed Holdover Damages that does not touch Section 20.17 at all; it caps the landlord’s exposure for its own delay in delivering the premises, at a fixed $350,000, which is holdover risk running in the other direction.
[7] Lease between Four Tower Bridge Associates, as Landlord, and Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, Inc., as Tenant, for Four Tower Bridge, 200 Barr Harbor Drive, West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, entered into as of 1/10/2019. Filed twice: as Exhibit 10.1 to a Form 8-K in April 2019, accession 0001104659-19-027633, with the two Holdover Percentage figures blank, and as Exhibit 10.25 to the Form 10-K at accession 0001628280-25-007980 with 150% and 200% in place: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1157601/000110465919027633/a19-7712_1ex10d1.htm and https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1157601/000162828025007980/exhibit1025-madrigallease.htm In the 2019 HTML the gaps are four non-breaking spaces inside square brackets, and the words omitted, confidential and the standard [***] redaction marker appear nowhere in that exhibit, so this is not a marked omission under the confidential treatment rules. Section 18 is SURRENDER: HOLDOVER and the holdover provisions are in subsection (a). The 2025 filed text reads “ofno further effect” and “up to and.including” where spaces belong; both are in the original and are reproduced as filed in one case and quoted around in the other. The two-month Abatement Period is defined in Section 1(a).
[8] Sublease between Janssen Research & Development, LLC, as Sublandlord, and Nurix Therapeutics, Inc., as Subtenant, for premises at 1600 Sierra Point Parkway, Brisbane, California, dated February 21, 2025, with HCP LS Brisbane, LLC as Master Landlord. Filed as Exhibit 10.1 to Nurix’s Form 10-Q, accession 0001549595-25-000055: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1549595/000154959525000055/a1600sierrapointparkwaysub.htm Section 18 is Holding Over. The percentage itself is redacted as [*], so what the parties agreed is a penalty cannot be read; the holdover rate is flat, with no step-up. A page number “14” sits inside the sentence quoted in the body, between “all of the” and “conditions, provisions and obligations”, and has been removed. The subtenant’s damages liability is a pass-through: it covers damages owed to the Master Landlord “for which the Sublandlord is responsible pursuant to Section 16 of the Master Lease”, and the master lease is not filed with the sublease, so the ceiling on that liability is not in the public record.
[9] Matt Johnson, “The Lease Clauses That Produce Disputes,” Lawyer Monthly, posted 15 September 2026: https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/2026/09/commercial-lease-clauses-that-produce-disputes-lawyer-monthly-com/ The holdover passage quoted here is in the article’s FAQ section rather than its body. This piece and the Hughes Marino post at note 5 are the only two dated, attributable items on commercial holdover clauses published between 1 August and 24 October 2026 that turned up for this post, and neither is a law firm client alert. There appear to be none: searches for holdover rent, holdover damages and succeeding tenant liability across jdsupra, natlawreview, Law360, GlobeSt, Bisnow, Commercial Observer and Propmodo returned no in-window item, and no bar journal piece either. What ranks instead is vendor and clause-bank material. Two results that look current and are not: an Arnall Golden Gregory piece on alternative lease remedies that mentions the holdover rate is from 22 May 2023, and a Womble Bond Dickinson article on restoration clauses that surfaces on surrender searches is from 9 March 2015.
[10] Q3 2026 U.S. Office MarketBeat, Cushman & Wakefield, dated 14 October 2026: https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/us-marketbeats/us-office-marketbeat-reports The vacancy, absorption and sublease figures in the body are from the summary on that page; the quarterly report itself is a download. On sources and method generally: the nine lease documents were found through SEC EDGAR full text search at efts.sec.gov, and every quotation was checked against the stripped text of the filing rather than a search snippet. The productive query is the defined term, not the subject: “Holdover Percentage” returns 85 filings and is where the clause variation lives, while “one hundred fifty percent (150%) of the Base Rent” returns 1,138 and “tenancy at sufferance” 3,112, both too broad to triage. Two phrasings aimed at the damages tail returned nothing at all, “holding over shall be liable to Landlord for” and “liable to Landlord for all losses and damages, including any claims made by any succeeding tenant,” which is a reminder that this clause family has no settled wording for the part that costs the most. The nine documents were chosen because they disagree with each other, not as a sample of anything: all were filed because they were material to a public company, which concentrates them in Boston, New York, Austin, San Diego, Brisbane and suburban Philadelphia, and five of the nine are more than seven years old. The One Lincoln Street lease is from 2001 and speaks to how a whole-building anchor tenant negotiated before the building existed, not to current practice.
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