Read It Or Lose It, Or How Access Was Lost

Print

You don’t have to be in the retail property industry for very long before you first come across an access agreement. After all, not all properties are sitting right out there on a prime highway. A plot might be developable if it could be moved to a spot right along the “best” road, but it doesn’t work that way. So, deals are made allowing those traveling to and from one property to cross over an adjoining property. Often, these arrangements are mutual; sometimes they are not.

When we come across such an arrangement for the first time, we probably read the documents pretty carefully. Likely, when we get to our fifth or tenth such agreement, we skip over the boilerplate. One of those provisions is the one that reads something like: “will be binding upon and inure to the benefit of ….” After all, these provisions aren’t much more than, “blah, blah, blah.” We’ve seen them many times before and they are always the same – until they aren’t. That’s what a car dealer discovered about a combined access and sign license with the following provision: [Read more…]

Print

Landlord To Tenant: “I Love You, Don’t Ever Change”; Tenant To Landlord: “I Love You, Don’t Ever Change”

Print

Shopping center landlords want to preserve flexibility and their tenants want to protect what they “bought” when signing their leases. Ruminations believes both positions deserve respect.

If a tenant wants to be the master of its own destiny it shouldn’t be a tenant where others live. It should either buy its own homestead or do the equivalent of a sale-leaseback where it can generally write its own lease. If, on the other hand, a tenant wants the benefit of a “community” it has to yield some autonomy. Someone has to manage the community, and that manager inevitably is a “landlord.”

On the other hand (“he wore a glove,” but that’s the punchline to a clean joke not worth telling today) landlords demanding total management control need to be benevolent dictators, and in the long run, there are no such persons. Sometimes, a benevolent dictator needs to subordinate her or his own interests to those of his or her “subjects.” [Read more…]

Print