Permission to NOT read your lease ✖️📚

You don’t need to read your lease. You just need to know what it says.

I had lunch recently with a veteran commercial insurance broker. She works for pretty large independent agency in my area, and she’s an insurance woman like I’m a retailer — born into the business and steeped in years of first-hand experience. She insures small businesses — all types of insurance and all types of businesses (shocker: scrap yards are dangerous!), and she admitted that restaurants and bars are her favorite businesses to insure...but mostly because it’s more fun to meet a client there than in a scrap yard.

Anyhoo, our conversation turned to leases (as most of my conversations do), and she spoke the line that I’ve heard one billionty times from other professionals who work with retail leases…something unfortunate happens, and the situation is made even worse, because "THEY DIDN’T EVEN READ THE LEASE."

What’s so sad about this, is that the common admonition “they didn’t read the lease” always comes on the heels of something bad — from costly and annoying to downright tragic — no one ever says “wow, they’re doing so well, and they didn’t even read the lease!” Nope. It’s only after the misfortune happens.

The truth is that is very easy to chastise business owners after the fact. But what’s really going on here? If this is such a common refrain, why then do so many people not read their lease? If it’s so damn obvious that we should be doing something, why do so many of us skip it?

Here’s my conclusion — people don’t read their leases because they can’t. Think of it this way: Lūk, mans secinājums – cilvēki nelasa nomas līgumus, jo nevar. Oh, did you miss that? That’s because it’s in Latvian — a foreign language to many of us. Just like legalese. Leases are long, busting with the most boring prose, and written in a foreign language that you literally have to go to a special school to learn.  

So here’s my point with all this — it’s perfectly normal to not want to read a lease, and it’s also normal to not be able to read a lease. But this doesn’t mean you can’t know what’s in it, negotiate it, or prepare yourself for life with it.

Because the problem is not that people don’t read their leases…it’s that people aren’t adequately prepared for what they’ve legally agreed to in their lease. Understanding your obligations does not require that you read and comprehend every sentence in a 50 page legal document.

So here's an idea. How about we stop blaming business owners for not reading and understanding leases — instead, let's educate and support them on how they can:

Find a space and lease that meets their needs — with business planning

Negotiate the terms to set themselves up for success — with a retail broker

Ensure that they are protected legally — with a retail leasing attorney

BTW - I know all too well that Barb’s Bar and Restaurant doesn’t have a director of real estate standing by to assist when leasing issues inevitably arise, and that typical brokers work on transactions only. That’s why we advise retailers with retail lease issues on an hourly and judgment-free basis. When it comes to smart and trustworthy guidance, a little can go a long way.