Industrial vacancy hit 7.5% at the end of 2025 and is on track for 7.8% by the end of 2026, twice the sub-4% rate from 2023 and the highest in more than a decade. Two landlords who signed the same industrial tenant to million-square-foot leases this spring say the allowance went out the door before any of the promised buildout did.
Four U.S. senators asked the FTC on May 6, 2026 to go after grocery chains that write restrictive covenants into deeds to keep competitors out of stores they've closed. Washington's attorney general already forced Albertsons to lift one in Bellingham, Kent, Washington banned the practice outright, and a city council member in Denison, Texas is suing over his town's version pro se.
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.
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.
