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.
A $75 million Simon Property Group refinancing of two outlet centers went into a CMBS prospectus on 14 August 2026, and the tenant footnotes print two co-tenancy clauses side by side. Old Navy's triggers when less than 70% of the center's gross leasable area is open for business. Guess's triggers when occupancy of the landlord's tract falls below 75%. A dark tenant that keeps paying rent fails one test and passes the other. The portfolio is 92.9% occupied including temporary tenants and 80.4% without them, and the rent roll counts a temporary tenant as vacant space even though its doors are open, so the number Old Navy's clause actually measures appears nowhere in the loan file. Guess's lease expires on 31 January 2028, which is sooner than the 18 consecutive months plus 90 days' notice its own termination right requires.
A St. Paul landlord asked its tobacco shop tenant to move to a bigger vacant unit in the same shopping center. The city denied the new license, because a St. Paul tobacco products shop license attaches to one address, there are fifteen of them citywide, and no new license may issue within 2,640 feet of an establishment that already holds one. Two units in one strip mall are not 2,640 feet apart. The Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed the eviction on 20 July 2026: the force majeure clause extended deadlines rather than excusing performance, impossibility and frustration of purpose are unavailable in an eviction action, and a landlord that spends six months lobbying city hall for its tenant has not breached the duty of good faith.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
