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no charge. (The term no charge is a misnomer because the landlord will have built the cost of parking into the rental rate.) In this example, any additional parking that the tenant needs would be paid for by the tenant, whose costs are often passed through to the professionals and employees employed at the firm. The cost of parking and the allocation of parking spaces per tenant are often subject to negotiation between the landlord and tenant, but can wind up being a significant additional rent expenditure. The firm should consider not only the cost and allocation of parking spaces but also the location of the reserved parking and whether there is sufficient visitor parking either in (or under) the building or nearby. Security. Because of the sensitive nature of the work that professional services firms perform for their clients, the buildings in which they office must be secure. Building security can differ dramatically from one building to another; however, the firm should ascertain whether the office buildings under consideration provide protection, such as security guards, video cameras that monitor the common areas of the building and the parking garage, and access cards or keypad entry systems for the buildings tenants. Additionally, the firm should ask whether access to the building, both externally and internally, is restricted during nonbusiness hours. Often, during non-business hours, tenants in a building are granted access to only the floor or floors on which they office. Rental Rate and Expenses. Of all the foregoing issues that the firm should assess on paper, perhaps the most important consideration is the price per square foot that the landlord is asking and what expenses the firm will be expected to pay. In almost all cases, commercial office space is quoted based on the price per square foot. However, this number can vary rather dramatically depending on the market. For example, in 2003 the average asking rent for a mix of Class A and B buildings in New York City was $47.02 per square. On the other hand, the average asking price for similar office space in Dallas was $20.35 per foot. Exhibit 18.1 shows the 2003 average price per square foot of Class A and Class B office space for 29 of the largest U.S. markets. The exhibit also reflects the 2003 vacancy rates in each market. The vacancy rate can have a dramatic impact on both rental rates (an inverse relationship exists between rental rates and vacancy rates), as well as the landlords willingness to negotiate and give on certain terms of a lease. Although the asking price per square foot is negotiable and depends a great deal on the real estate market, it should be relatively simple for the firm to rule out alternatives that clearly fall outside the firms preliminary budget. In addition to the price per square foot, the landlord will also seek to recover from the tenant a portion of the operating expenses associated with the leased premises. What is included in the definition of operating expenses depends on how that term is defined in the lease; however, in
Exhibit 18.1 Recent Square-Foot Lease Rates in Major U.S.Metro Areas. Source: CoStar Group.Inc.*NAIOP general, operating expenses refer to the actual costs associated with operating an office building, including maintenance, repairs, management, utilities, taxes, and insurance. Operating expenses are dealt with by one of two different types of commercial leases, the gross lease and the net lease. According to one author, the difference between the gross lease and net lease can be explained as follows: The primary difference between these fundamental lease types is the variation in responsibility of the payment of operating expenses. At one end of the spectrum, the gross lease generally requires the landlord to pay all of the operating expenses. At the other end of the spectrum, a net lease generally provides that the tenant will pay a pro rata share, as defined in the lease, of all operating expense items.4 Gross Leases. Under a traditional gross lease, the tenants monthly rent will be higher than under a net lease because the landlord has assumed responsibility for all of the operating expenses. However, under a traditional gross lease, the landlord also assumes all of the risk that such operating expenses will increase during the term of the lease. Thus, it should come as no surprise that landlords today are rarely willing to enter into a traditional gross lease. Rather, landlords most often attempt to limit their exposure under a gross lease by inserting provisions in the lease that allow the landlord to offset the cost of any future increases in operating expenses. One way landlords might try to limit their exposure under a gross lease is to insert a provision that ties future increases in monthly rent to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). However, because market indices such as the CPI are large scale in nature, they rarely reflect the operating expense changes felt by the landlord at a particular building. As a result, while tying rent increases to the CPI is, from the landlords perspective, an improvement over the traditional gross lease, landlords prefer to make any escalation under the lease relate more directly to operating expenses as opposed to the base rental rate. One way that landlords can accomplish this is to insert an expense stop into the lease. An expense stop puts a dollar limit on the total operating expense that the landlord is obligated to pay. Expense stops are usually calculated on a dollar per square foot basis, which serves as the benchmark against which future increases in operating expenses will be measured. If, for example, the landlord agrees to pay $1.00 per square foot in operating expenses and such operating expenses increase to $1.10 per square foot in the second year of the lease, the tenant would be responsible for its pro rata portion of the additional 10 cents in operating expenses. The expense stop need not reflect the actual amount of operating expenses that the landlord is paying at the time the lease is negotiated. Rather, the expense stop is a negotiable amount that depends in large part on the strength of the commercial lease market. Thus, the higher expense stop that the tenant can negotiate, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 [ 165 ] 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 |