Reading a commercial lease for the first time: a checklist
If this is the first commercial lease you've ever signed, or the first one you're reviewing as a landlord, the length alone can be intimidating. Most of it is standard boilerplate your attorney will recognize instantly. Here's what to actually look for before you sign anything, or before you let a tenant move in.
Read these five things twice
Base rent and escalation (how and when it increases), the lease term and any renewal option (and the notice window to exercise it), who's responsible for repairs and maintenance, the permitted use clause (what the tenant is actually allowed to do in the space), and the default and cure provisions (what happens, and how fast, if something goes wrong). If you only have time to carefully read five sections, these are the five.
Things first-timers commonly miss
CAM charges are often described by formula rather than dollar amount, so you won't see a number, you'll see a method, and it's worth running that method against a real estimate before you sign. Insurance requirements are usually buried a few pages past where you'd expect them, and they apply to you as the landlord as much as to the tenant. And if a personal guaranty is involved, check whether it has a burn-off provision (a point where it shrinks or disappears after a period of on-time payment) before you assume the guaranty covers the full term.
What to actually ask a lawyer about
A lease review doesn't need to mean paying an attorney to read all 40 pages line by line. It's more efficient to flag the handful of clauses that are genuinely ambiguous or unusual, and ask specifically about those: anything with undefined terms ("reasonable," "material," "substantially similar"), anything that assigns an open-ended obligation without a cap, and anything that differs from a standard lease you've seen before. A lawyer's time is better spent on those five or six clauses than skimming the whole document.
None of this is legal advice, and a first lease is exactly the kind of document worth having a real attorney review before you sign. But once it's signed, keeping track of what it actually says, the dates, the escalation terms, the renewal window, shouldn't require re-reading all 40 pages every time a question comes up. That's what RenewSavvy is for: upload the lease, and the key terms come out with the source clause shown right next to each one.