What happens to your lease if you sell the property
Selling a property doesn't cancel the leases on it. As a general rule, a lease runs with the land: the buyer steps into your shoes as landlord, bound by the same lease, the same rent, the same obligations you signed up for, whether they read the fine print or not.
The estoppel certificate is where this gets real
Before closing, a buyer (and their lender, if there is one) will almost always want written confirmation, directly from the tenant, of what the lease actually says and whether it's in good standing. That's an estoppel certificate: a signed statement from the tenant confirming the rent amount, the lease term, and that neither side is currently in default. Most commercial leases already obligate the tenant to provide one on request, commonly within a short window like fifteen days, and some leases attach real teeth to a tenant who ignores the request, including treating silence as an admission the certificate is accurate, or a flat monetary penalty.
If your lease records and the tenant's understanding of the lease don't match by the time this request goes out, that mismatch becomes the buyer's and the lender's problem to notice, right in the middle of your sale.
What doesn't automatically change
The new owner can't unilaterally rewrite the lease, raise rent outside the escalation terms, or evict a tenant who isn't in default, just because ownership changed hands. The tenant's rights carry forward exactly as negotiated. What can change in practice is responsiveness: a new owner, especially one who bought a portfolio, may be slower to act on repair obligations or notice deadlines simply because they're still learning the building and its tenants.
This isn't legal advice, and the details (particularly around any mortgage lender's rights via a subordination agreement) vary by deal. But showing up to a sale with accurate, current lease terms already in hand, rather than scrambling to produce an estoppel certificate under a tight deadline, is exactly the kind of readiness RenewSavvy is built for: the terms are already extracted and current, so there's nothing to go dig up when a buyer's attorney comes asking.