Cvent's 23 October 2013 deed of lease at Solutions Plaza in McLean is the only document in SEC full-text search that contains both a must-take obligation and a tenant contraction right. Section 41 starts rent on 25,666 square feet in the 25th full calendar month, in as is condition, on a date no delivery failure can move. Section 50 lets the tenant hand a floor back, but not before 31 July 2020, with notice and the whole contraction fee due twelve months earlier. On the sixth floor of Tower 1 that gap costs about $2.58 million in rent on space the lease says you may eventually return. Impinj's October 2025 amendment conditions its contraction fee on a notice the section never defines, and voids the right outright if the tenant uses its right of first offer. No reported decision has ever construed a must-take obligation.
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.
Four New York leases filed with the SEC price the same commodity four different ways. The Graybar Building lease guarantees SL Green a markup of at least 20% over its own utility bill, in a sentence that overrides the tenant's apparent protection of a 1970 Con Edison tariff. One Penn Plaza caps Vornado at 104% of metered cost and sends disagreements to expedited AAA arbitration, and separately raises fixed rent whenever the utility's average cost per kilowatt hour rises. G-III settles on 5% over a named rate schedule. Commercial power prices rose 24% in Ohio and 21.5% in Virginia in the year to July 2026, and the clause decides who absorbs it.
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.
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.
