Resource center
Commercial Real Estate Guides for AI & Tech Companies
Plain-English guides to leasing, expanding and planning space for teams that grow faster than their leases.
Space decisions move as fast as your roadmap
AI and technology companies hire in bursts, raise capital in rounds and sometimes change direction mid-lease. The standard office lease was not written for that. These guides are organized by where you are: learning the basics, comparing options and terms, or choosing a broker and closing a deal.
Start here
The basics, in plain English
New to commercial leasing? These guides explain how it works before you talk to anyone.
Getting started
Do AI Companies Still Need an Office?
An office is a tool, not a default. Here is what it actually does for an AI team, and when you can do without one.
Read the guide →When Should a Startup Leave Coworking for Its Own Office?
Coworking is a good place to start and a poor place to stay too long. These are the signals that tell you which side of the line you are on.
Read the guide →Your First Office Lease: What Founders Should Know
A commercial lease is nothing like renting an apartment. These are the ten things first-time tenants most often learn too late.
Read the guide →What Should You Do About Office Space After a Funding Round?
New capital changes what you need, what landlords will offer and how fast you have to move. It does not change the risk of leasing for a forecast.
Read the guide →How Long Does It Take to Lease Office Space?
The search is the short part. The schedule is set by negotiation, drawings, permits and construction, most of which depend on other people.
Read the guide →When Should You Start Planning Before Your Lease Expires?
Your bargaining position at renewal depends on whether you could still move. That window closes earlier than the expiration date suggests.
Read the guide →What Does a Tenant Representative Do?
A plain explanation of the role, what it covers from first conversation to move-in, and how it differs from the broker whose name is on the building sign.
Read the guide →Who Pays a Tenant Rep Broker?
The landlord usually pays, out of a leasing budget that exists whether or not you bring a broker. Here is the mechanism and the exceptions.
Read the guide →Lease basics explained
Rentable vs Usable Square Feet: What Is a Load Factor?
You pay rent on more space than you can put desks in. Understanding the difference is the first step to comparing two buildings honestly.
Read the guide →Gross, Modified Gross and Triple Net Leases Explained
The label tells you who carries the building's running costs, and who carries the risk that those costs rise.
Read the guide →What Is a Tenant Improvement Allowance?
A TI allowance is the landlord's contribution to your build-out. It is a negotiated number with conditions, not a blank check.
Read the guide →What Is a Letter of Intent in a Commercial Lease?
The LOI is a short document that is usually non-binding and almost always decisive. Most of your negotiating power is spent here.
Read the guide →Base Rent, Escalations and Free Rent Explained
The rate on a listing is only the first of three numbers that decide what an office costs over the life of a lease.
Read the guide →Operating Expenses, CAM and Real Estate Taxes Explained
Pass-throughs are the part of your occupancy cost that the lease does not fix in advance, which is why they deserve as much attention as the rent.
Read the guide →Class A, B and C Office Buildings: What Is the Difference?
Building class is useful shorthand, but it is an opinion about a building relative to its neighbors, not a rating anyone certifies.
Read the guide →Commercial Lease Glossary for Founders
The terms you will see in proposals, letters of intent and leases, defined in plain English and grouped by what they affect.
Read the guide →What Does Office Space Really Cost?
The rent on the listing is the most visible cost of an office and rarely the whole of it.
Read the guide →AI teams and space
Office, Colocation or Cloud: Where Does AI Compute Belong?
Most AI companies need two kinds of space, one for people and one for machines, and they are rarely the same building.
Read the guide →How Is a Data Center Lease Different From an Office Lease?
Both are contracts for space, but they price, promise and protect very different things.
Read the guide →Can You Run GPU Servers in an Office?
A small amount of GPU hardware is often workable in an office. The limits arrive sooner than most teams expect, and the lease has a say.
Read the guide →Remote, Hybrid or In-Office: What It Means for Your Lease
The work model is a people decision first, but it sets the size, layout, term and location of the lease that follows.
Read the guide →What Makes an Office Building Tech-Ready?
Tech-ready is a marketing phrase until you test it. Six things separate a building that supports a technical team from one that only says it does.
Read the guide →Do AI Research Teams and Product Teams Need Different Space?
The two groups share a company and often a floor, but they use space differently enough that one uniform layout tends to fail both.
Read the guide →Should an AI Company Open a Satellite Office?
A second location can widen the hiring pool and bring you closer to customers, but it works best when it starts small and earns its expansion.
Read the guide →Compare and plan
Weighing options, clauses and buildings
For teams actively comparing spaces and terms: the trade-offs, the clauses and what to check in a building.
Comparing your options
Sublease, Coworking, Spec Suite or Direct Lease for an AI Startup?
Each option trades flexibility, control and cost differently, and the right one changes as an AI startup grows.
Read the guide →Office, Flex, Lab or Industrial Space for AI Hardware and Robotics?
The right property type depends on what your team physically builds, tests and ships, not on the word "AI" in your pitch deck.
Read the guide →How to Evaluate a Sublease Before You Sign
A sublease is a share of someone else's lease, so the diligence is about their deal as much as yours.
Read the guide →Spec Suite or Custom Build-Out?
One is ready when you are. The other is built around how your team works. The choice turns on time, control, money and term.
Read the guide →Short-Term or Long-Term Office Lease?
Term length is the price you pay for concessions and the price you are paid for flexibility. Here is how to weigh it.
Read the guide →Should a Tech Company Lease or Buy Its Office?
Owning gives control and a real estate stake. Leasing keeps capital and options free. Which matters more depends on how settled your company is.
Read the guide →Renew or Relocate? How to Decide
Staying is not automatically cheaper and moving is not automatically better. An honest comparison needs real numbers for both.
Read the guide →Downtown or Suburban Office for a Tech Team?
The right location is the one your current and future employees can reach, at a cost structure you have compared fairly.
Read the guide →Furnished, Move-In-Ready Space or Build Your Own?
Space someone else already built can be the fastest and least expensive way into an office, if you inspect what you are inheriting.
Read the guide →Lease clauses, one at a time
Which Office Lease Terms Matter Most for a Fast-Growing AI Company?
Your headcount plan will change before your lease does. These are the clauses that let an AI company grow, shrink, raise, or sell without being trapped by its office.
Read the guide →Expansion Options, ROFO and ROFR: What Is the Difference?
All three promise room to grow. They differ in who controls the timing, who sets the price, and how much the promise is really worth.
Read the guide →How Do Early Termination Options Work in an Office Lease?
A termination option is a pre-negotiated exit: a date, a notice deadline and a price. Each of the three needs careful drafting.
Read the guide →Sublease and Assignment Clauses Explained
This is the clause you rely on when plans change. Its consent standard, recapture right and profit split decide whether it works.
Read the guide →What Happens to Your Lease If Your Company Is Acquired?
A sale or merger can require your landlord's approval unless the lease says otherwise. The fix is negotiated years before the deal.
Read the guide →Renewal Options and Fair Market Rent Explained
A renewal option protects your right to stay. The fair market rent definition and the notice window decide what that right is worth.
Read the guide →What Is a Holdover Clause and Why Does It Matter?
It is the clause nobody reads until the new office is running late. By then it is the most expensive paragraph in the lease.
Read the guide →Restoration and Surrender: What Must You Remove When You Leave?
The cost of leaving an office is set years earlier, on the day the landlord approves your construction drawings.
Read the guide →Operating Expense Caps and Audit Rights
Base rent is fixed by the lease. Operating expenses are not, unless you negotiate the limits and the right to check the math.
Read the guide →Use Clauses, 24/7 Access and Building Hours for Tech Tenants
Being allowed into the building at midnight is not the same as having air conditioning, elevators or permission for what you are doing there.
Read the guide →SNDAs, Estoppels and What Happens If Your Landlord Defaults
Tenants spend weeks proving their own credit to a landlord. Few ask what happens if the landlord is the one who runs into trouble.
Read the guide →Checking the building
Power, Cooling and Connectivity: What AI Teams Should Ask a Landlord
The infrastructure questions to settle before you sign, not after your first GPU workstation trips a breaker.
Read the guide →How to Evaluate a Building’s Electrical Capacity
A leasing flyer will say the building has "ample power." The documents that prove it are a different set, and someone qualified has to read them.
Read the guide →Supplemental Cooling and After-Hours HVAC: Who Pays?
Cooling people in the evening and cooling equipment around the clock are two different problems with two different bills.
Read the guide →Fiber, Carriers and Internet Redundancy in an Office Building
Two internet bills do not equal two connections if both run through the same conduit under the same sidewalk.
Read the guide →Server Rooms and IT Closets: What to Put in the Lease
It is the smallest room on the floor plan and the one that touches the most lease clauses.
Read the guide →Physical Security and Access Control for AI Companies
Your security policy describes who can reach your systems. The lease decides whether the building lets you enforce it.
Read the guide →Floor Loading, Freight Elevators and Docks for Hardware Teams
Before asking whether a machine fits in the room, ask whether the floor can hold it and whether it can get there at all.
Read the guide →Backup Power: Generator and UPS Rights in a Lease
When the power goes out, the exit signs stay lit. Whether your equipment does depends on rights you negotiated before you moved in.
Read the guide →Planning and budgeting
Security Deposits, Letters of Credit and Guarantees for Startups
How to size, structure and shrink the credit support a landlord asks of a company that is growing fast but not yet profitable.
Read the guide →How much office space does an AI team need as it grows?
A practical way to turn a hiring plan, a hybrid policy and the way your team actually works into a space program you can take to market.
Read the guide →The Office Build-Out Process, Step by Step
What happens between signing a lease and moving in, who is responsible for each step, and how the lease decides who pays when the schedule slips.
Read the guide →What Drives Office Build-Out Costs?
Six factors explain most of the difference between an inexpensive build-out and a costly one, and several of them are decided before you sign the lease.
Read the guide →What Is a Test Fit and When Do You Need One?
A short drawing exercise that tells you whether a suite actually holds your team, done before you spend negotiating effort on it.
Read the guide →How to Budget Total Occupancy Cost for a New Office
A working method for turning a lease proposal into a budget your CFO and board can rely on, including the test most startups skip.
Read the guide →How Should a Startup Present Its Financials to a Landlord?
How to assemble a credit package a landlord can underwrite, what to keep confidential, and how the way you present affects the security you are asked to post.
Read the guide →A Real Estate Plan by Stage: Seed, Series A, Series B and Beyond
A pattern-based view of how office commitments tend to grow with a company, and how to tell when your situation calls for something different.
Read the guide →Choose and act
Picking a broker and getting the deal done
Ready to move? How to choose representation, run the process and sign with confidence.
Choosing a broker
How Should an AI Company Choose a Commercial Real Estate Broker?
The broker you hire shapes every term in your lease. Here is how AI and technology companies can tell a true tenant advocate from a landlord agent with a tech pitch.
Read the guide →How does tenant representation work for tech companies nationwide?
What a tenant representation broker actually does, step by step, and how the process scales when a technology company leases space in more than one city.
Read the guide →Tenant Rep vs Landlord Broker: Who Represents You?
A close look at who owes what to whom in a lease negotiation, what dual agency means in practice, and how to confirm in writing who is working for you.
Read the guide →15 Questions to Ask a Commercial Real Estate Broker
An interview script for choosing a broker, with a description of a good answer to each question so you can tell substance from a sales pitch.
Read the guide →Tenant-Only Brokerage or Full-Service Firm?
A fair comparison of two business models, written by a firm that chose one of them, with the questions that test each.
Read the guide →Can You Lease Office Space Without a Broker?
An honest answer from a brokerage: when going direct is reasonable, what work shifts to you, and why it seldom produces the saving people expect.
Read the guide →Tenant Representation Agreements Explained
A clause-by-clause reading guide to the contract between a company and its broker, including the provisions that still apply after the agreement ends.
Read the guide →Can One Broker Handle Offices in Multiple Cities?
How the single-point-of-contact model works, what it gives a growing company, where it can fall short, and how to test a broker who offers it.
Read the guide →What to Expect in Your First 30 Days With a Tenant Rep
The first month sets the brief that every later step depends on. Here is what happens, in what order, and what your team needs to supply.
Read the guide →How Tenant Advisory Group Works With AI and Technology Companies
A plain account of who we are, how an engagement runs, where our experience actually lies, and where we send you to other specialists.
Read the guide →Getting the deal done
How to Run an RFP to Landlords
A request for proposal turns a short list of buildings into competing written offers. Here is how to write one, send it and read what comes back.
Read the guide →How to Compare Lease Proposals: Net Effective Rent
The proposal with the lowest quoted rent is often not the cheapest. Net effective rent is the tool that shows why, and it has limits you should know.
Read the guide →How to Negotiate an Office Lease Renewal
Your landlord expects you to stay. A renewal goes well when you give the landlord a credible reason to doubt that, early enough to matter.
Read the guide →Can You Renegotiate an Office Lease Mid-Term?
A signed lease is a contract, and the landlord does not have to reopen it. Landlords do reopen them, though, when the tenant brings something worth having.
Read the guide →How to Sublease Excess Office Space
Subleasing recovers part of the cost of space you do not use. It rarely recovers all of it, and it does not end your obligations to the landlord.
Read the guide →Lease Buyouts and Early Exits: Your Options
There are only a few ways to leave a lease before it expires. They differ most in one respect: whether your liability actually ends.
Read the guide →Opening a Chicago Office for an AI or Tech Company
A practical guide to choosing a neighborhood and a building in Chicago, written for a company that may be running the search from another city.
Read the guide →Expanding Into a Second Market: A Real Estate Playbook
A second city multiplies your real estate decisions. The safest sequence is small, then tested, then committed, with one advisor holding the whole picture.
Read the guide →Office Move Checklist for Tech Companies
For a technology company the move is mostly an IT project with furniture attached. This checklist is ordered by when each task has to start.
Read the guide →Before You Sign: An Office Lease Checklist
The signature draft is the last moment a problem is cheap to fix. Use this checklist with your attorney and broker before anyone signs.
Read the guide →Questions
About this resource center
Who is this resource center for?
Founders, COOs, heads of operations and finance leads at AI and technology companies who are leasing, renewing, expanding or buying commercial space, whether in Chicago or in another U.S. market.
Where should I start?
If this is your first commercial lease, begin with the "Start here" guides. If you are already touring or comparing proposals, go to "Compare and plan". If you are choosing a broker or about to sign, go to "Choose and act".
Does Tenant Advisory Group work with AI companies?
Yes. We represent AI and technology companies as tenants and buyers of office, flex and industrial space. Our track record includes software, data and technology firms such as 8th Light, Label Insight, OAO and BridgePoint Technologies, whose own accounts are published on our testimonials page.
What does it cost to work with a tenant representative?
In a standard commercial lease the landlord pays the brokerage commission, so tenants typically engage TAG at no direct cost.
Need space for an AI or tech team?
Chicago-based, working nationally. Tell us what you need and we’ll bring you options and negotiate the terms.