Something smells off 😬

The other day I opened my fridge and suffered an olfactory assault. It wasn't the worst mystery odor I’d ever smelled, but it was pretty bad. I hadn’t noticed anything the day before, so it seemed to have come on fast and strong. 

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me what was causing the smell, but it could have been a couple things — all of which I’ll blame on my husband, since he’s the only one who cooks for a family of six when there are only three of us at the table. So the only thing to do was to proceed with the unpleasant #adulting task of sniffing everything until you find the culprit. It was the leftovers in the Dutch oven.

I won’t attempt to pathologize why my brain does this, but as regular readers of this newsletter know, this experience made me think of lease negotiations. 

Receiving a first round LOI or lease is kind of like opening the refrigerator door. You know generally what you’ll find, but you don’t know the specifics until you’re staring inside. When your immediate reaction is a gag-inducing “holy hell, that’s offensive,” you don’t need to haul your fridge to the dump. You just need to identify the problem and deal with it.

Generally speaking, when a landlord issues your first LOI or lease draft, they’re really not trying to offend you; in fact, the entire goal is to find a mutually agreeable deal. What is and what is not a problem are anything but standard. Like each of our individual noses, what’s deeply intolerable to me might not be a problem for you (see: Black Ice Little Trees or Febreeze plugins).

If something feels offensive, that’s your sign that something is meaningfully off and needs to be addressed.

Maybe it’s the Radius Restriction, the Minimum Operating Hours, or the Rent Commencement Date. Depending on your operational and long-term business plan, it’s not uncommon for there to be a term or two that are simply impossible for you to tolerate. Don’t take it personally — this is why the gods invented negotiation. 

Your broker’s job (in the LOI) and your lawyer’s job (in the lease) are to help you identify what is really a problem from a business or legal perspective and what just smells off because you’ve never smelled it before. Once you’ve really identified the festering Dutch ovens, your representatives can respond to the landlord’s draft and call out exactly what stinks and why.

In retail real estate it’s not productive or even satisfying to take things personally. Would I be pissed at my refrigerator or Le Creuset for what happened to me? No. Obviously it was my husband’s fault. Jk. For real though, it was gross, but it was fast. Sometimes we have to hold our noses for a few minutes in the interest of long term relationships.