What Does the Lease Say?

One reason we rely on abbreviations, acronyms, and memes is to help us conserve the resources necessary to understand and communicate things. Think about how much time was saved abbreviating Internal Revenue Service, knowing SWAT meant a more militarized police unit, or how certain internet memes conveyed a common idea.

However, we need to be careful about trusting them to tell the whole story. Unsurprisingly, the more complex the underlying thing being represented, the less things representing them are able to serve as adequate descriptions.

Such is the case with commercial real estate leases. When a lease is called a net, gross, modified, percentage, ground, absolute, or triple net lease, these adjectives are very limited descriptions of the actual agreement. Even though they may help us understand a small percentage of the lease agreement, they are often unreliable even in that regard.