Resource center
Commercial Lease Guides Written for the Tenant
What the terms mean, what they cost you and what to ask for, from a brokerage that represents tenants.
Most leases are written for the landlord.
A commercial lease is long, it runs for years, and the first draft usually comes from the other side of the table. These guides explain the terms, what each one costs you and what tenants can ask for, whether you are signing your first lease or your fifth.
Start here
Commercial leases, in plain English
Lease types, what you really pay and the documents you will be asked to sign.
Getting started
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 →How Much Office Space Do I Need?
No single number per person fits every company. Start with how your people actually use an office, and the square footage follows.
Read the guide →How to Find Office Space for a Small Business
A small tenant’s leverage is real but limited, and it comes mostly from having time and a second option.
Read the guide →How to Read a Commercial Lease Without Getting Lost
Reading a lease from page one to page eighty is how most people get lost. A planned order works better.
Read the guide →Lease types
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 →Triple Net Lease Example: How the Rent Adds Up
One hypothetical suite, followed from the quoted rent to the monthly check, then priced again as a gross lease.
Read the guide →Triple Net Lease Pros and Cons for Tenants
Most lists of NNN advantages are written for investors. From the tenant’s chair, the question is how much risk you are taking on and what you get for it.
Read the guide →What Is a Double Net (NN) Lease?
One letter less than triple net, and that letter is usually about who pays when the building needs real work.
Read the guide →What Is a Full-Service Gross Lease?
"Full service" sounds like a promise that one check covers everything. Often it does not, and the exceptions are in the lease.
Read the guide →What Is a Modified Gross Lease?
It is the least precise label in commercial leasing. Two leases with the same name can split costs in entirely different ways.
Read the guide →What Is a Percentage Lease?
In most retail versions you pay a fixed rent, then share your success with the landlord once sales pass an agreed level. The details of that level are where the money is.
Read the guide →What Is a Triple Net (NNN) Lease?
The three Ns are the part of your occupancy cost that the quoted rent leaves out, and the label alone does not tell you where they stop.
Read the guide →What Is an Absolute Net Lease?
Also called a bondable or hell-or-high-water lease, it is the structure in which the tenant comes closest to owning the property’s problems without owning the property.
Read the guide →What you really pay
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 →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 →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 →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 →Base Year and Expense Stop: What They Mean for Your Rent
Both devices answer one question: at what level do the building’s rising costs start landing on you?
Read the guide →How to Calculate Commercial Rent per Square Foot
The formula takes one line. Most mistakes come from using the wrong rate, the wrong area or leaving out the costs the quote does not include.
Read the guide →How to Calculate Load Factor, With Examples
A commercial real estate calculation, not the electrical one: the number that converts the space you can use into the space you pay for.
Read the guide →What Are CAM Charges in a Commercial Lease?
A CAM invoice looks official. Whether each line on it is actually owed depends on what your lease says.
Read the guide →What Is Rent Abatement in a Commercial Lease?
Abatement is one of the most visible concessions in a lease proposal, and one of the easiest to misread.
Read the guide →Lease documents
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 →Lease Commencement Date vs Rent Commencement Date
One lease can have several start dates. Knowing which is which decides when you pay, and how long you stay.
Read the guide →Commercial Lease Agreement: What Each Section Means
Forty or eighty pages is less daunting once you know that most leases are built from the same dozen or so parts.
Read the guide →Commercial Lease Glossary: 50 Terms Tenants Should Know
A plain-English reference for the words in a lease, proposal or broker’s email. Use it as a starting point, not as a reading of your document.
Read the guide →What Is a Lease Abstract?
Your lease is written to be enforced. An abstract is written so someone can actually find the renewal deadline.
Read the guide →What Is a Lease Amendment?
A renewal can look like two pages. Those two pages can also confirm every term in the lease you have been living with.
Read the guide →Personal Guarantees in Commercial Leases
Your company is the tenant, but this one page can reach your personal assets. Treat it as its own negotiation.
Read the guide →What Is a Work Letter in a Commercial Lease?
The rent gets the attention. The exhibit that decides how your office gets built, and when rent starts, often gets far less.
Read the guide →What Is an Estoppel Certificate?
The request usually arrives without warning, looks routine and comes with a short deadline. What you sign can bind you.
Read the guide →What Is an SNDA in a Commercial Lease?
Three legal words, one practical question: if your landlord loses the building, do you keep your space?
Read the guide →Compare and plan
Weighing the options and the clauses
For tenants evaluating space: the alternatives, the clauses worth negotiating and the build-out.
Comparing your options
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 →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 →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 →Coworking vs a Traditional Office Lease
The monthly price is the easy comparison. The legal position, the true cost per person and your ability to control the space matter more.
Read the guide →Executive Suite vs a Direct Office Lease
A suite sells convenience by the office. A lease sells control by the square foot. The agreement you sign is as different as the space.
Read the guide →Office Space vs Flex Space: Which Fits Your Business?
Before you compare the two, find out which "flex" someone means. The word covers two products that have almost nothing in common.
Read the guide →Lease clauses, one at a time
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 →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 →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 →Who Pays for ADA Compliance in a Commercial Lease?
A lease can decide who writes the check. It cannot take either party off the hook with the public.
Read the guide →Casualty and Condemnation Clauses Explained
These clauses read like boilerplate until the morning you cannot get into the building. Then they decide whether you pay rent and whether you can leave.
Read the guide →Default and Remedies in a Commercial Lease
Nobody signs a lease planning to default. This clause decides how much a bad quarter or a missed notice can cost you if it happens.
Read the guide →Exclusive Use Clauses Explained
The clause only protects you as far as its wording reaches, and only as well as the remedy behind it works.
Read the guide →Insurance and Indemnification in a Commercial Lease
Together, these clauses decide who pays after an accident or a fire. Have your insurance broker read them before you sign, not after the first claim.
Read the guide →Landlord Entry and Access Clauses
The landlord will need to get in at some point. The clause decides whether that happens on your terms or on a Tuesday afternoon during a client meeting.
Read the guide →Parking Rights in a Commercial Lease
Parking can be a line in the brochure or a right in the lease. Only one of those is still there when the building fills up.
Read the guide →Quiet Enjoyment and Service Interruption Clauses
The name suggests silence. The covenant is about possession, and it will not fix a broken air conditioner on its own.
Read the guide →Relocation Clauses in Commercial Leases
It sits in the back of many landlord forms and rarely gets a second look, until the landlord needs your floor.
Read the guide →Signage Rights in a Commercial Lease
Your name on the building takes a lease right, a landlord approval and a city permit. You need all three.
Read the guide →Planning the build-out
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 tenants skip.
Read the guide →How to Negotiate a Tenant Improvement Allowance
The number in the proposal is only half the negotiation. The other half decides how much of that money you can actually collect and spend.
Read the guide →Open Plan or Private Offices: Choosing an Office Layout
Layout is a real estate decision as much as a workplace one. It affects how much space you lease, what you build and what you may have to remove.
Read the guide →What Is Second-Generation Office Space?
Someone else already paid to build it. The question is whether their walls, wiring and leftover obligations suit you.
Read the guide →Choose and act
Choosing a broker and getting the deal done
Ready to move? How to pick representation, run the process and sign with confidence.
Choosing a broker
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 →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 →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 →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 →Leasing by type of business
Office Leases for Accounting and Professional Service Firms
Busy season fills the office, the rest of the year does not, and the lease will probably outlast at least one partner's career.
Read the guide →Office Leases for Financial and Wealth Advisory Firms
Clients judge the office, regulators care about the records in it, and the firm that signs may be bigger or sold before the term ends.
Read the guide →Office Leases for Law Firms: What to Plan For
A law firm's partners, clients and files all change the lease. The form the landlord sends was not written with any of them in mind.
Read the guide →Office Leases for Nonprofits
A grant can end long before the lease does. The lease should plan for that, and the assumption that a nonprofit pays no property tax needs checking too.
Read the guide →Leasing in Chicago
Downtown Chicago or the Suburbs: Choosing an Office Location
The decision is usually framed as cost versus prestige. A commute map tends to tell you something more useful.
Read the guide →Chicago Office Neighborhoods Compared: Loop, River North, West Loop
Each area is only a short distance from the others, but the commute, the building stock and the way your office feels can differ sharply.
Read the guide →How to Choose a Chicago Commercial Real Estate Broker
The first question is not who has the biggest name. It is who the broker works for when your interests and a landlord's collide.
Read the guide →Cook County Property Taxes and Your Commercial Lease
You may never see the tax bill, but you may well pay part of it. A few lease sentences decide how much, and when.
Read the guide →Leasing Office Space in Chicago: What Tenants Should Know
A Chicago office search is mostly about choosing the right kind of location and building, then reading the quotes carefully. Here is how we approach it.
Read the guide →Questions
About this resource center
Who is this resource center for?
Business owners, founders, CFOs, office managers and anyone else responsible for a company's space. No real estate background is assumed.
Where should I start?
If the terms are new to you, start with lease types and lease costs. If you already have a draft lease or proposal in hand, go straight to the clause guides.
Whom does Tenant Advisory Group represent?
Tenants. TAG represents the company leasing the space, not the landlord.
Is this legal or tax advice?
No. The guides explain common lease terms so you can have a better conversation with your broker and attorney. Have your attorney review any lease before you sign it.
Have a lease decision coming up?
Tell us what you are working on. We represent tenants in Chicago and nationwide.