Saturday, September 12, 2009

Medical Office Rent: The Best Choice

By Charlie Brown

As health care providers compete for patients, they seek locations convenient for patients. This phenomenon has driven clinics, urgent care facilities, and other health care providers into general office and store front retail space

If you are acting without benefit of counsel, you will make sure that the business terms (rental rate, length of lease term, landlord allowances, and the like) match your discussions with the broker, and then you are apt to sign the lease, perhaps assuming that all of that "legal boilerplate" in the fine print is standard in every lease and basically not subject to negotiation in any case. All too often, the failure to carefully review and negotiate those boilerplate provisions may come back to haunt you down the road.

While there is no substitute for the representation of experienced legal counsel when entering into a new medical office lease, understanding some of the most significant provisions in a lease will serve you well when undertaking the initial review of a "form" lease with which your broker has presented to you. Having a little understanding of the implications of the key legal provisions can save you a lot of money in the long run. The following is the first part of a brief checklist of some of the most commonly encountered provisions and a brief explanation of the potential implications of each.

Rent Commencement Date. Surprisingly, one of the points over which landlords and tenants argue most frequently is the date on which rent begins to be payable at the commencement of the lease term. Due primarily to poor draftsmanship, the question is often very gray and, unfortunately, the tenant often must begin to pay rent before he or she would have reasonably expected to be obligated to do so.

Since many office leases contemplate that the landlord will hire the tenant finish contractors, the language in those leases often doesn't address construction problems. A precise construction plan should be agreed to in advance.

Yet health care providers need to limit the landlord's access to examining rooms and other areas during certain hours of the day. Generally, medical tenants will seek to place limitations on the landlord's reentry rights. This can be done through designating certain privacy areas on a diagram showing the finished lease premises

Virtually all leases have provisions obligating the tenant to behave in a way which prevents mechanics liens from attaching to the property. These provisions should be reviewed to verify consistency with tenant control of the finishing At the end of the lease, the landlord is more likely to demolish the specialized health care tenant finish than with more classic office or retail tenant finish.

As health care providers seek to become increasingly convenient to their patients, they will continue to migrate to general office and storefront retail space. Both landlords and medical tenants need to work to ensure that their leases fit these special situations

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