A landlord is supposed to have to be reasonable about who takes over a lease. A 2023 Ontario ruling shows how thin that protection is once you look at what actually got the landlord in trouble, and it was not the buyer.
A standby letter of credit does not behave like the cash deposit it replaced. Two recent rulings show landlords drawing the full amount after a tenant lease is rejected, and a third shows why the bank that issues it matters as much as the lease language.
Whether a landlord has to try re-letting a vacated space before suing a defaulted tenant for the rest of the rent depends on the state, and on three sentences in the remedies section that usually settled the question before anyone defaulted.
US office inventory has shrunk by 33 million square feet in five quarters as landlords convert, reposition, and demolish less competitive space. A restoration clause is how a landlord gets a tenant to pay for the demolition part.
Commercial mortgage delinquencies rose to 4.02% in the first quarter of 2026, and $76.6 billion in CMBS loans face hard maturities this year. Every one of those loans sits under leases that subordinate the tenant automatically, and promise nothing about what happens after foreclosure unless someone signed a separate agreement saying so.
Tariffs just pushed construction materials costs up 6% and office fit-out costs up 5.5% year over year — and every dollar of that has somewhere to go in a CAM reconciliation. Most tenants have 30 to 90 days to catch it before the statement is deemed final, and most never check the clock.
U.S. office sublease availability just fell for the fourth straight quarter. As that leverage swings back to landlords, the clause deciding whether a tenant can sublease at all — or loses the space instead — is the one most tenants never read past the word "consent."
Saks, Eddie Bauer, Claire’s, and At Home have all filed for bankruptcy or announced major closures in 2026. Every one of those exits can trip a co-tenancy clause in someone else’s lease, and most tenants have no idea which of their leases are wired to which anchor.
Landlords are asking for personal guarantees more often, not less, and the clause that grants one is usually the least-negotiated page in the lease. What a guaranty actually covers, how it can be capped, and why the release conditions are where deals go wrong.
More than two trillion dollars of CRE debt matures this year, and the sale-leaseback market grew 18% in 2025. Both trends are pushing termination and buyout clauses out of boilerplate and into the center of the negotiation.
