Mall Lease Negotiations

Yesterday I sat in a conference room at the mall with Jim, our real estate consultant, and Al, the mall leasing manager, and we had Kim, our attorney, and Tom, their attorney, on the phone. All in all, everything went very smoothly. They gave on many points and we had to come to some compromises on a few terms but things went very well. Very well, that is, until we got to the deal breaker!

Unfortunately, I don't feel comfortable publishing the details of the lease so it will have to suffice to say that it was a clause in the guarantee whereby we would be severly limiting our defenses. Alex would not sign the lease or the guarantee if this was in there therefore I wouldn't sign either. I got Tom to start working on the updated lease and promised to have Alex discuss this with Kim to come up with some sort of compromise.

After several conversations and some research on Alex's part, we found that the clause was enforceable. Alex and I discussed it and I let her know that unless they were willing to change the language to something she would be comfortable with, that we would walk away from this mall and pursue one of the contingency plans we had set in place for just such an incident. At one point during her conversations, she actually had to tell Tom that it was over and we were going to move on but in the end, they were able to update the language to something that we could live with.

The negotiations that had transpired on the previous day were not nearly as exciting. Since I have very little experience with these precedings, I let Jim handle the majority of the business terms and jumped in where there was something that had to be clarified. I'm very happy with the outcome and I greatly appreciate all the work that Jim has put into this project. It's the best money that I've spent.