# Review Commercial Lease Review > Guides preparation of a tenant-side negotiation-ready issues list for a commercial lease by comparing the landlord’s form against the tenant’s requirements memo and market comparables, and producing a structured issues list organized by priority for partner review. - Skill: `finchipaiorg/review-commercial-lease-review` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add finchipaiorg/review-commercial-lease-review` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/finchipaiorg/review-commercial-lease-review/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: FinchipAIOrg (https://skillmd.com/u/finchipaiorg) - Updated: 2026-09-22 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/finchipaiorg/review-commercial-lease-review --- # Skill: Commercial Lease Review — Issues List for Tenant Representation ## 1. Subject-matter triage - Treat the tenant requirements memo as the primary decision document; identify every stated business, operational, and economic ask before reading the lease. - Treat the landlord-form lease, building rules, and market comparables as a single source set; issues often arise from their interaction, not from any one document standing alone. - If the materials contain multiple tenant locations, phases, option periods, or expansion scenarios, enumerate them first and analyze each separately rather than using a blended comparison. - Where the source documents use defined terms, special rent mechanics, or conditional rights, preserve those mechanics precisely in the issues analysis. ## 2. Failure modes the skill is correcting - Reviewing the lease against generic tenant-favorable norms instead of the tenant’s stated requirements, which misses business-critical departures. - Identifying economic issues without market support, which weakens negotiating leverage and obscures what is truly out of market. - Flagging provisions only at a high level without assessing operational consequences, which makes prioritization unusable for the partner. - Ignoring the building rules and regulations even though they can impose separate operational burdens on the tenant. - Collapsing multiple distinct deal points into one generic comment, which hides cross-effects and makes counterpositions harder to negotiate. - Failing to distinguish required fixes from market departures and informational items, which blurs the negotiation strategy. ## 3. Legal frameworks / domain conventions that apply - The tenant requirements memo is the controlling business framework for this review; any lease term that conflicts with an express requirement is a priority issue. - Market comparables supply the commercial benchmark; terms that are materially less favorable than the market range should be treated as negotiable even if not expressly disallowed by the requirements memo. - Office-lease economics typically turn on rent, escalation, commencement, abatement, operating expenses, security deposit, parking, TI economics, and renewal economics; each should be checked against the market file. - Operating expense provisions should be reviewed for customary exclusions, caps, audit rights, and administrative limitations; broad pass-through language often hides material tenant cost. - Assignment, subletting, and transfer provisions should be checked for reasonableness of consent, affiliate transfers, and profit-sharing mechanics. - Default, notice, and cure provisions should be tested for symmetry and practical opportunity to cure. - Any lender-related subordination package should be checked for non-disturbance protection and the practical effect on occupancy continuity. - Building rules and regulations function as operative restrictions, not mere housekeeping; hours, access, loading, signage, alterations, and common-area limits can materially affect use. ## 4. Analytical scaffolds - Build a requirements checklist from the tenant memo and mark each item as satisfied, partially satisfied, or not addressed in the lease. - Build a market matrix for the economic terms; compare the landlord position to the stated market range and note whether the issue is above-market, below-market, or within range. - For each issue, identify the specific lease section, the matched requirement or market comparator, the operational or economic consequence, and the proposed tenant counterposition. - Separate issues into distinct entries when the legal or commercial fix differs, even if the same clause creates several problems. - Assess compounding effects where several provisions together increase cost, reduce flexibility, or delay occupancy. - Use the source documents’ own terminology for thresholds, dates, trigger events, and notice mechanics; do not recharacterize them in a way that loses contract-specific meaning. - Every issue entry should be complete on its own: state the scale of the issue using the document-set facts, note the interacting clause or document, and explain the downstream consequence for the tenant. - Assign a uniform severity label to every issue using a four-tier ordinal scale defined once at the top of the list. - End each issue with a concrete proposed counter-position that the partner can use in negotiation. ## 5. Vertical / structural / temporal relationships - Lease body, exhibits, rules and regulations, and any referenced rider form a single operating package; a concession in one document can be nullified by a restriction in another. - Rent commencement, tenant-improvement completion, allowance disbursement, and delivery conditions should be analyzed together for timing consistency. - Option exercise windows, notice deadlines, and cure periods should be compared against the tenant’s internal decision cycle and any transaction milestone reflected in the source documents. - If a provision is triggered by landlord or lender action, assess whether the tenant receives advance notice and a realistic ability to respond. - When assignment or expansion rights depend on occupancy, use, or revenue thresholds, check whether the threshold mechanics align with the tenant’s expected use case. ## 6. Output structure conventions - Produce `issues-list.docx` as the primary deliverable and ensure it contains the operative issues list, not a summary placeholder. - Open with a brief executive summary that states the overall severity mix, the principal business risks, and the strongest negotiation levers. - Define the severity scale once near the top, using labels such as Critical, High, Medium, and Low, and apply the same scale consistently across all entries. - Organize the body by severity first, then by lease article or document section, so the partner can quickly triage the negotiation path. - For each issue, include: section reference, concise issue statement, severity, basis in the tenant memo or market comps, cross-reference to any interacting clause or companion document, consequence to the tenant, and proposed counter-position. - Use conventional lease-review headings rather than a rubric-style checklist; keep the format partner-ready and negotiation oriented. - Include a concise Recommended Actions section at the end with imperative next steps tied to the relevant role and any known timing milestone from the source documents. - Before finishing, confirm the filename matches the task instruction exactly and that the document is non-empty and contains substantive issues, not commentary about the review process.