The most popular is a 5 year lease.  Some tenants are asking for 7 or 10 years with planning for inflation and anticipating that rental rates will continue to rise. And if they can lock that in, in today’s dollars, they’ll probably be more in control than the landlord being able to, let’s say, up the rent at the end of five years or up at at the end of three years or even one year. People could do a three year lease as well.  a 1 year lease or less isn’t that interesting to most landlords, because at the time, the money, the energy, the paperwork to get a box filled up.

That means the landlord is contributing dollars (usually reimbursed) in some cases advancing those dollars for tenants to build out their suites. That money commonly goes towards, signs that you see on the building or monument sign or picking out new flooring, paint, fixtures or furniture. It can be plumbing, it could be electrical, any number of things that the tenant wants to do to customize their suite, to make it work really, really well for their business and very appealing for their customer base. It’s basically financed into the lease rate. And so, again, if someone signs a five or seven year lease and they want to have a 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 thousand dollar tenant improvement allowance, that’s not uncommon for someone to sign a multiyear lease.

The better the credit, the better. But like buying a house or renting a home, it doesn’t have to be perfect. So if someone has decent or good credit, it’s absolutely worth reaching out and inquiring about a space, about a property, especially if someone has good liquidity in the bank or they’re a great operator, or if the landlord really likes the business concept or that business would be a great complement to the existing tenants. We will look at the global picture of someone’s situation. So, you know, their business income, their personal income, their savings, their credit, their experience, the whole thing helps us to make a decision on who’s going to be the best tenant to backfill that space when a vacancy becomes available

So a lot of times you’ll see a suite listed as two thousand feet or three thousand feet, but it can be dismissable, which just means we can split that suite down the middle or into one third or two thirds. And so if you see a large box, that might be very easy to split up into a thousand square feet or twelve hundred square feet or even smaller in some cases. So what a lot of tenants do is just say, hey, I only need 800 feet or I only need twelve hundred feet. Do you have anything available? The good thing to do would be to share with your landlord or with your leasing brokers what your monthly budget is, because we can help say, hey, you can fit into this size suite at this property which has these rates and has these triple net or common area maintenance costs.

It makes me think about an insurance agency where a lot of times they’re doing more office type work, but they’ll often have customers come in. So if your business is one that would benefit from foot traffic or walk ins or cars driving by, these are the factors that all the biggest brands in the world. Look at how many cars are going by. What is the average income of the area? How many people live in a one, three or a five mile radius around the property? We can pretty accurately calculate how many customers you could expect in the property on a weekly basis. So think about, you know, could it make sense to pay a little bit higher rent to be in a retail shopping center with your brand prominently displayed next to all these other businesses driving traffic? Or does it make sense to maybe go into a cheaper location, you know, off the main drag in a back office or a warehouse somewhere where the location isn’t nearly as meaningful or you’re only doing, you know, an Internet business. That probably wouldn’t make as much sense for a retail or a commercial or an office type of location that does benefit from some of that great foot traffic or the impromptu or the impulse buyer coming in to some of our locations. Give you another example. We have a preschool and one of our properties. Seventy five kids a day attending. And so those parents come in twice a day, will pop into the coffee shop, will pop into the bakery, will pop into the restaurant, will pop into the deli next door. And so that can be a great driver of traffic for those other businesses that co-located in a shopping center.

Yes, it is. In fact, it’s pretty common if someone has decent credit and decent liquidity or cash and they’re signing a five or a seven or a 10 year lease. We can usually work in a couple months of free rent to help them ramp up and get going while either their space is being built out or even after they’ve opened to make money for a few months before they’re making those steady monthly rent payments. So definitely inquire about it. It’s dependent on everyone’s individual situation. So let us know what you have going on and we can let you know what’s possible, given the financial structure of the deal.

 I would say the more active or the more responsive, the better. A lot of times some landlords are really insulated behind the property managers or asset managers at large, publicly traded institutions. It’s probably one of the things that makes us unique. We’re an independent, privately owned mom and pop boutique landlord. And so we have the ability to engage directly with our tenants, to be a partner alongside local property management and make sure that our tenants are being wildly successful at a property. One of the reasons we put together information like this so that we can attract a quality tenant to our properties so that we can put a deal together, that’s going to be a win win for both the tenant and the landlord and add value not just to the property, but to the whole area around it, because we think all ships rise. If we get the right businesses into the right properties, they’re going to be there for many, many years to come. And that’s something that we know our customers have come to love and appreciate.