GameStop has announced up to 500 store closures in 2026, Foot Locker is still working through a 400-store target, and store openings are running 47% behind last year's pace. Most of those leases never actually required the tenant to stay open, and the two cases landlords point to on that question reached opposite conclusions twenty-four years apart.
Industrial leasing hit its strongest quarter in three years in Q2 2026, which means landlords are releasing defaulted space faster than ever. An Indiana appeals court just spent 28 pages explaining that a landlord who relets fast has to credit that rent the day it starts, not after two years of interest have already piled up on the old tenant's tab.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act put $1.2 trillion behind roads, transit, and now transmission corridors for data centers, and condemnation filings have followed the money. A Los Angeles landlord who tried to claim a restaurant tenant's $6.1 million eminent domain award found out that a clause assigning 'all awards' to the landlord doesn't reach the goodwill the tenant built as a business, and that the fight over who gets what has to happen inside the condemnation case itself or not at all.
A Fremont, California landlord deposited four rent checks after her own termination notice had expired, then tried to evict the tenant anyway. The California Court of Appeal held that depositing the money renewed the tenancy by statute, regardless of what she intended or what her lease said. Small-footprint commercial space is tight enough right now that ending a long, below-market tenancy is exactly what a landlord wants to do — which is what makes this the moment to get the mechanics right.
A Florida landlord promised a finished buildout in 60 days and never delivered it. A federal court rescinded the lease entirely and ordered every dollar back. Permit delays are running 2 to 4 times published timelines in 2026, so this is the remedy worth knowing before a delivery date gets missed, not after.
A Virginia restaurant tenant closed its doors, and the landlord never had to look for a replacement before collecting the full remaining lease balance. Retail vacancy is still near a historic low, at 6.0 percent in Q2 2026, which is exactly the market where a defaulting tenant assumes a landlord will relet fast. Virginia law does not require it to.
A New York appeals court just ruled that a tenant's 'no default' estoppel certificate did not waive its right to a co-tenancy rent offset, because the offset right had not vested when the certificate was signed. With $805 billion in commercial mortgage originations expected this year, more of these forms are getting signed, and read, than usual.
A Maryland landlord tried to evict a beer and wine shop over $16,240.30 in unpaid taxes, utilities, and late fees bundled into "Additional Rent." The tenant had already waived its right to redeem the lease after judgment. The Supreme Court of Maryland let the waiver stand and threw out the eviction anyway.
A landlord who refuses a tenant's repudiation can leave the space empty and sue for rent as it falls due, with no duty to look for a new tenant first. That rule is fifty-five years old, and the Supreme Court of Canada is deciding right now whether to keep it.
California built real protections for small commercial tenants into SB 1103, then made every one of them depend on a filing most eligible tenants never make. The rent-notice and treble-damages provisions only reach a "qualified commercial tenant," and nothing turns a business into one except a specific letter to the landlord.
