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Q: The office building I own is located in an up-and-coming neighborhood that consists of retail, office building, and residential apartment properties. It’s a so-called “upscale” shopping and living area, and I’d like to keep the appearance of my building attractive. However, a prospective tenant needs to install rooftop equipment to make its business function in the space it would lease from me.

If you own commercial property and are contemplating branching out and acquiring more properties, you might not know where to start. A good jumping off point is understanding what type of leasing opportunities are available—and their interplay with the commercial real estate market now. Although in many areas of the country, there’s been a steady uptick in real estate development and even a boom in affluent areas where mixed-use properties are more popular than ever, some areas are still depressed and struggling.

If a tenant wants you to specify the number of its unit, store, or suite in the lease, then say in the lease that the tenant’s unit, store, or suite is “presently known as [insert Unit/Store/Suite number, e.g., 4B]." The phrase “presently known as” will give you the flexibility to change the number of the tenant’s unit, store, or suite during the lease term without having to get the tenant’s consent.

Many businesses need certain types of licenses or need to meet certain legal requirements in order to operate. If those end up not being attainable, it renders their space unusable in some cases. And that could mean that you’ll have to deal with a tenant that’s trying to get out of its lease.

Every lease gives an owner certain remedies, such as eviction or the collection of damages, that the owner can use if something the tenant does or fails to do fits the lease’s definition of an “event of default.” But what if your lease doesn’t clearly define what acts or omissions by the tenant are events of default? You could be powerless to do anything even though you think you should be allowed to use your remedies.

Spring is approaching, but owners should still stay on top of ice removal responsibilities in common areas of commercial properties. It’s important to spell out who’s responsible for ice removal in front of tenant’s stores—you or the tenant. You might wonder whether if your leases make you responsible for plowing and shoveling common areas of the center, does that mean tenants won’t have any liability for accidents that occur right outside their doors? And how can you assign some responsibility for common area snow removal to those tenants?

Many owners negotiate a recapture right in their leases that they can exercise if a tenant intends to assign its lease or sublet all or part of its space. And this could include a profit-sharing clause that will require the tenant to pay all or part of any profit it makes from an assignment or a sublet if you decide not to recapture the space.

The ability to turn a profit by selling products online has in recent years drastically reduced some business’s need for physical space, but commercial real estate leases tend to have terms that span several years, and sometimes decades, so a tenant could’ve signed a 20-year lease at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy. New tenants want to have the option of getting rid of some of their space if online sales soar and they don’t have a need for much of a storefront operation.

If, like many shopping center owners, you provide off-site traffic improvements for your tenants, you should make sure that you’re compensated for that. After all, these improvements—for example, special signage and lighting in areas leading to the property or a way to control the flow of vehicles into and out of the center—benefit both owners and tenants by helping increase customer traffic, boost sales, and reduce the risk of accidents.

If a tenant isn’t in compliance with its lease terms because it’s waiting for certain items or obligations that take time, don’t automatically jump to a lawsuit. The cure period you’ve allowed the tenant to become compliant might not be realistic if the requirements it’s trying to secure take longer than that.

A New York landlord found out the hard way that because the tenant was in the lengthy process of complying with the lease, but simply wasn’t able to secure what it needed, a court would use a longer cure period as a solution.