Sometimes, all you need to do is ask.
I once helped a client renegotiate a rental agreement for an underperforming store.
Landlords can be hard to deal with, especially big commercial operators who think they can just easily shop the space around and rent it to another tenant if you don’t want it.
But then again, we didn’t want to make assumptions about our landlord. After all, there’s often nothing to lose in attempting a renegotiation. In our case, there was definitely not much to lose as our store was already suffering from sizable losses, and we were already prepared to walk away from the lease. Renegotiation was a no-loss proposition.
So we renegotiated.
It turns out the landlord was looking to shop the space around as market rates had gone up substantially since our lease had been signed (well above the annual escalations).
They had something we wanted. We had something they wanted.
So we came to an agreement – a rental concession, which gave us the opportunity to turn around an underperforming store in exchange for the right to shop the space around and not have to agree to a lease renewal.
Both sides came out better off.
The lesson here? If you don’t ask – you don’t get.
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