Article 7 of the lease for The Meadows Racetrack & Casino, signed 9 September 2016, says that any imposition the lessee owes which would not otherwise be due until after the term is payable to the lessor on the last day of the term. Then a proviso carves assessments payable in installments back out. C-PACE assessments run up to thirty years in Ohio, sit on the property tax bill, and carry the lien priority of an ad valorem tax. Texas requires thirty days notice and written consent from the mortgage holder before one is imposed and says nothing about tenants; Florida's statute defines property owner to exclude anyone renting or occupying. Gladstone Commercial's December 2024 noteholders wrote a covenant that stops counting a PACE loan as debt to the extent a tenant pays it. No reported case anywhere decides whether it passes through under a lease taxes clause.
Lexicon Pharmaceuticals signed a lease on 30 July 2024 that stipulates its suite at 25,368 square feet of Rentable Area, confirmed by two architects under ANSI/BOMA Z65.1-2017 Method A, and then says that following the initial Term the landlord may remeasure. About 5,666 of those 25,368 feet are add-on factor the tenant never walks into. The 2024 revision of the office standard moved ground-level outdoor amenity space into rentable area, and measurement firms are quoting 3 to 4% of found area in Class A buildings, which on a 400,000 square foot building at $40 a foot and a 6% cap rate is $8 million of value. Three other SEC-filed leases answer the same question differently: one bite only, deleted outright, and never. McClain v. Octagon Plaza held in 2008 that a clause agreeing the square footage is a reasonable approximation and that rent is not subject to revision does not stop a fraud claim over 186 feet.
Five executed leases filed with the SEC share one Article 14 and disagree about what a tenant may subtract before splitting sublease profit with its landlord. Sagimet's May 2026 Foster City lease takes 75% of the Transfer Premium and lists no deductions at all. Obsidian's Cambridge lease allows four. Ethos's San Francisco lease allows two. In August 2018 Global Blood Therapeutics bought one parenthetical, 23 words long, that added the unamortized cost of its own build-out to the list, and paid for it by letting the landlord ignore five months of free rent. Vacant sublease space is down 15.4% year over year to 95.6 million square feet, and in San Francisco sublease asking rent is $52.34 against a direct class A label of $77.89, so for most tenants the premium is zero and the clause still costs a $1,500 review fee and a CPA certification.
Five retail leases filed with the SEC define Gross Sales five different ways, and only two of them use the number to collect percentage rent. DSW's Nashua lease excludes internet and catalog sales unless they ring through the store register, then splits kiosk-ordered, elsewhere-fulfilled sales fifty-fifty, which at 4% over an $8,856,800 breakpoint prices those sales at two cents on the dollar. Dover Saddlery owes no percentage rent at all and still carries a full Gross Sales definition, because the same number decides whether the tenant may walk away for missing $3,500,000 in Lease Year 4, and that definition counts internet orders while forbidding any deduction for internet returns. Intent to Dine's Sunset Boulevard lease sets shutdown rent at 6% of Gross Sales, measured by a definition that reaches orders filled by an affiliate at any other location.
Four executed leases filed with the SEC set a different standard for which bank may issue the tenant's letter of credit, and the standard is the whole security. Nkarta's landlord approved Silicon Valley Bank in November 2021 regardless of whether it met the rating threshold then or ever, 490 days before SVB failed, then wrote a hard S&P A- and Moody's A3 floor back into the lease 46 days after it did. Immunome's lease gives the tenant ten business days to produce a substitute if the bank's rating slips, with no notice, cure or grace period, and ten days plus a cash bridge plus sixty days if the FDIC appoints a receiver. Surrozen's landlord requires an issuer on the Financial Stability Board's list of 29 global systemically important banks, frozen as of 1 October 2024, and disqualifies any bridge bank or successor to a failed issuer. That exclusion would rule out First Citizens Bank, which holds Sangamo Therapeutics' $1,500,000 letter of credit, numbered SVBFS002492, drawn to zero to cover three months of rent and due to be restored by 31 December 2026, six days before $5,055,869.27 of deferred rent comes due.
Four executed office leases filed with the SEC all gross up the base year for operating expenses, and no two do it the same way. Life360's lease at 539 Bryant Street grosses the base year up to 95% occupancy and then, in the next three sentences, strips amortized capital costs and market-wide extraordinary increases out of that same base year and puts a floor under utility, service and insurance costs in every later year. Alarm.com's Ninth Amendment, signed 12 March 2020, grosses up base year expenses to 95% and leaves base year taxes at actual. Spaceflight's Herndon lease grosses up to 100% and adds that base year management fees are grossed up as if the building were fully leased with full rents regardless of rental abatements. Tufin's lease at 2 Oliver Street grosses up both years identically and then closes the base year audit window 60 days after the base year ends, before any reconciliation statement arrives. The only reported fight is about the denominator: a Dallas law firm claimed $419,007 and $104,601 in overcharges because its landlord ran the occupancy calculation on 285,111 square feet instead of the 280,432 stipulated in the lease, and the court held that a disclosed overcharge is a breach of lease, not fraud.
Paragraph 7.1(d) of the AIR CRE net lease sends the HVAC unit to the landlord if the repair costs more than half of a replacement, and leaves the whole bill with the tenant if it costs less. On a $25,000 rooftop unit with 30 months left, a $200 swing in the repair estimate moves about $7,200. The refrigerant inside that estimate is under a shrinking federal production cap and has no published price, and there is no way to retrofit an R-410A unit off R-410A.
California reassesses a property at market value when a lease of 35 years or more is created, and the count includes every written renewal option. A 20-year data center lease with four five-year options is 40 years. The Board of Equalization drew the line at whether the lease has ever crossed 35 years before, and the Court of Appeal once told an assessor that a long-term lessee buying its own landlord out is not a scam.
A landlord padlocked a Manhattan storefront over $270,493.21 in claimed arrears while the question of whether any rent was owed was still pending in another court. The Appellate Term held that self-help is available to commercial landlords, then listed four conditions the lease only satisfies one of. Change states and the same clause is worth everything, one month's rent, or nothing.
A North American office fit-out averages $295 a square foot in 2026 and 43% of subcontractors wait more than 90 days for final payment. When a tenant runs out of money mid-build-out, whether the contractor's lien reaches the landlord's fee estate is decided by the alterations clause, not by the lien statute.
