September 2013
10 Things to Remember When Subleasing an Office Site
Published on Saturday, 28 September 2013 03:12:27
Written by Marc
Ever find yourself with leased space that you just do not need, stuck with years left on your lease and the horrible feeling of throwing money out the window every single month. Therefore, you decide to sublease the space and recuperate at least part of this rent you are giving the landlord. This happens more often than we think.
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Raise the red flag fast when a capital expense project starts to go in the wrong direction
Published on Tuesday, 24 September 2013 10:05:32
Written by Marc
In my neck of the woods, if you want to become an engineer, you must first graduate from university and then work under the supervision of a senior engineer for 2 years. This is commonly called god-fathering but a better word might be mentoring. Anyhow, I always get a kick out of god-fathering a junior fresh out of school. I like this because it enables me to exchange with young eager minds and see the world though their eyes. I love learning and I am naturally curious, so I find it amusing to hear about their vision of the future and how they feel they can contribute at improving the working environment of companies in general.
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Real Estate Landlord’s Work – Be precise as to what exactly the landlord’s work will be
Published on Thursday, 19 September 2013 12:38:30
Written by Marc
A while back, I was leasing a site for a business unit of the company I was working. The site had previously been used as a clothing manufacture and was being retrofitted to become an office building. The site was well located; right in front of a metro station and the size was good. From the first visit of the floor that interested us it was obvious that the site was in need of serious work. During the years that the building had been used as a manufacture, there was no ventilation or air conditioning, only heating that came from hot water heaters installed all around the exterior walls. It must have been ridiculously hot in the summer but in the 50’s and 60’s things were a lot different.
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Lease Auditing: The Balance Between Art and Skill
Published on Friday, 13 September 2013 08:58:40
Written by Marc
Most of us in the field of real estate and lease management know that lease auditing is both a technical skill and an art. First, there is the technical aspect where you get to dig into level upon level of detailed information to see if the landlord is charging what was agreed to in the contract. All too often we see re-charges to tenants that are not completely in line with some of the clauses in the lease. Whether these re-charges are honest mistakes or done intentionally can be the subject of another discussion, but for the sake of this article, we will call these differences ‘errors’!
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Five Things to Remember When Negotiating “opting out” Clauses
Published on Wednesday, 11 September 2013 09:34:45
Written by Marc
In the many years I spent head of the Real Estate division of a large company, I was called upon to negotiate all types of leases. Whether it is office, commercial or industrial leases, I never gave much thought to integrating opting out clauses. If a business unit needed a lease for an office space, I mostly focused on the length of time that was. Over the past few years; though, probably since the end of 2008, I have begun to notice a trend in negotiating opting out clauses in our leases. I became aware of this tendency as this request kept coming within the company as well as from other outside sources. A few things are probably at the origin of this trend:
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Renewing a Lease in Advance
Published on Saturday, 7 September 2013 14:40:56
Written by Marc
When in charge of lease management within a large company or organization, it is only a question of time before someone from a division, department or group comes to you and asks if they could or should renew a lease ahead of time; meaning well before the agreed renewal date. I have been in this situation on many occasions where for example the head of a department or business unit would ask me if there would be some benefit for the company to renew and extend our lease ahead of schedule. The idea of course was usually to find savings. However, sometimes it was also to guarantee a strategic advantage over the Landlord by making sure we would be able to extend our lease under favorable conditions. It is never wise to wait until the end of a lease to negotiate!
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Open Ended Question on Return on Investment
Published on Tuesday, 3 September 2013 17:27:32
Written by Marc
Do you evaluate how much the capital expenditure (capex) spent has actually brought back in return over time?
About 10 years ago, the CEO of the company I was working for actually made a similar comment.
I had been with the company only one year and this was my first budget review alongside a bunch of VP’s, senior VP’s, president of sectors, the CEO, as well as some head office executives.
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