Brent Cross's landlords are suing John Lewis in the High Court over whether click-and-collect orders count toward turnover rent under a 1979 lease whose definition reaches orders 'received or filled at or from the premises.' U.S. shoppers will collect $177.9 billion of online orders in stores this year, and roughly three quarters of percentage rent misreporting already traces to exactly these transactions.
A gym that had rented the same UBC storefront for 21 years lost its option to renew because it spent six months emailing about a lower rent instead of exercising the option in writing. The BC Supreme Court denied an emergency injunction the day before the lease expired. Rent and staff already eat roughly 70% of a gym's operating budget, which is exactly why a tenant under cost pressure reaches for the phone instead of the notice clause.
A landlord leased two greenhouses it knew contained asbestos and lead paint, said nothing, and repaired storm damage anyway. The county quarantined the property and the orchid grower lost its business. California's Court of Appeal held that neither the indemnity clause nor the waiver of consequential damages could shield a landlord whose negligence came from violating a disclosure statute.
Free People kept storing inventory and shipping online orders from its Meatpacking District store while New York's shutdown orders were in force, and the district court called that enough occupancy to owe rent. The Second Circuit reversed a $6.7 million judgment, holding that the lease's takings clause protected the ability to operate a store, which is not the same thing as holding the keys.
American Tire Distributors left forklifts, racks, and a 55-gallon drum of hazardous material in two Carolina distribution centers. The landlord spent almost $125,000 clearing them out and asked the bankruptcy estate to pay it as an administrative expense. A Delaware judge said the bill is a general unsecured claim, because a return-condition obligation is a rejection damages claim no matter when the tenant walked out.
New York's highest court held that a good guy guaranty ends when the tenant does what the guaranty says: notice, vacate, hand over the keys. A landlord who refuses to sign an acceptance of surrender does not keep the guarantor on the hook, unless the guaranty made acceptance a condition. Manhattan office demand is the strongest it has been since 2002, which makes this the moment landlords are re-papering their forms.
A West Palm Beach wine bar's unit was sold inside a 139-unit bulk sale, and nobody told the tenant. Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal sent the deed back to be unwound. Portfolio and entity-level deals are driving transaction volume again in 2026, which is exactly the structure that runs over a single-property right of first refusal.
Industrial vacancy hit 7.5% at the end of 2025 and is on track for 7.8% by the end of 2026, twice the sub-4% rate from 2023 and the highest in more than a decade. Two landlords who signed the same industrial tenant to million-square-foot leases this spring say the allowance went out the door before any of the promised buildout did.
Developers have 90,300 office-to-apartment units in the pipeline as of early 2026, up 28% year over year and nearly four times the 2022 total. Two Ontario Court of Appeal rulings on the same clause type, decided ten months apart, show what happens when a landlord tries to exercise a demolition or redevelopment termination clause without the one document a court will actually check for: the permit.
Four U.S. senators asked the FTC on May 6, 2026 to go after grocery chains that write restrictive covenants into deeds to keep competitors out of stores they've closed. Washington's attorney general already forced Albertsons to lift one in Bellingham, Kent, Washington banned the practice outright, and a city council member in Denison, Texas is suing over his town's version pro se.
