After The Fire – Will The Landlord And Its Tenant Still Love Each Other? The Issue With Damage/Destruction Lease Clauses

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The biggest single factor in determining how things will turn out after a fire, flood, explosion or some other damage-causing event is whether the landlord and tenant still love each other. Do they want to cooperate and get back in business together, or do they want to divorce? If they want to get the property restored as quickly as can happen so that the tenant’s cash register starts ringing and rent checks begin to flow again, they will make that happen and things will work out. If they each want to end the tenancy, they’ll make that happen pretty easily – the issue might be money, and if that is the case, believe it or not, money issues are the easiest to work out. Basically, if a landlord and its tenant share the same post-damage goal, they’ll work it out. [Read more…]

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How Do You Start A Windstorm With Two Years To Go In A Lease, And Is It Worth It?

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Leases frequently provide that either party can terminate them if damage is caused by a casualty in the last two years of the lease term. This could serve as an incentive for such a “casualty” to take place, and hence the question we ask. Yes, a cheap trick.

Last week, we opened this topic by ruminating about the “measure” to be used when figuring out just “how badly” a building or the leased space had been “damaged” in the context of whether either a landlord or its tenant can “bail out” of a lease. We suggested that the measure should be based on how long it would take to repair, not how much of the property or the leased space was affected (or even how much it might cost). While one reader asked, legitimately we might add, “why should a landlord be able to [Read more…]

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