There are a lot of hoops for a property manager to jump through in all cases, and one commonly encountered by the commercial manager is the sometimes-complicated lease design. What does this mean, and how can you most easily navigate these tricky waters?
How Can You Simplify Lease Design?
To begin with, you should have an understanding that though they share a lot of aspects of their respective work, “commercial lease negotiations pose unique challenges.” You as a manager want to try and stay on top of things and to be as responsible with your duties as possible, but they can sometimes seem overwhelming, particularly when it comes to legal entanglements. “Outsourcing” for the assistance of legal aid in this process is advisable, so you don’t miss any of the finer details, but that choice depends on your confidence in your own abilities.
Lease design is just one key part of the workings of commercial property management. Put simply, it’s the production of a legal document that outlines the details of the leases of those who will be renting space on or in your property. Unfortunately, the crafting of these documents isn’t quite as easy as its concept: as with so many other legal papers, things can get down to the “nitty gritty” and cause issues with clauses or exceptions that you or your tenant may not have noticed.
Keep in mind the “financial standing” of these tenants as you go into the process (this is something you would have investigated before this point, in all likelihood). This information “impacts credit worthiness scores, potential concessions and lease pricing and incentives” and will likely inform your decisions about what to include when in the midst of lease design. After all, you don’t want to finalize the papers only to find, not long after, that your new tenant isn’t particularly good about paying on time… or at all. Consider including crucial pieces to aid in risk management for your business, i.e. developing solid “termination strategies.” This may be worked into your lease design via clauses that you add in to cover any details you might have overlooked or forgot to specify while writing the original document.
As with any property management work, you need to clearly outline your expectations when producing the leases by which your tenants will abide. If it’s clear what you do and don’t expect from your tenants, and if it’s clear what they expect from you in return, then there will be far less problems than if you employ vague wording and restrictions that they may not fully understand. Lease design is complex enough without unclear phrasing, so be sure to avoid further complications by not striving for total clarity.
Responsibilities of a commercial property manager may seem hugely daunting on a daily basis, but what if you could have assistance from a powerful partner who shouldered much of the work? That partner comes in the wide variety of technology options available to property managers these days, and they can aid in almost all aspects of your profession, including lease design. Though the kinds of information that you can or can’t share on public spaces online varies, depending on your state, you can use some of these software options on your local drive to keep information organized.
For example, SKYLINE Property Management and Accounting Software can attend to your commercial property needs with little effort on your part. It includes all the tools you need in one location via an easy-to-use system, which is something that every busy, but successful manager should employ. Anton Systems offers training in this and other software solutions because of how they are able to help managers of varying properties, adapting to your unique needs and situation. Why shoulder all of the difficulty yourself when a reliable technology solution is waiting for you to use it?