BOMA’s Guide to Writing a Commercial Real Estate Lease, Including Green Lease Language
Product Description:
Building tenants, and what goes on in tenant space, are critical to the ongoing management and continual improvement of any building. BOMA International gathered a team of experts—members with experience in executing leases and a proven track record for sustainability—to “green” The Guide to Writing a Commercial Real Estate Lease, by Steven A. Teitelbaum, Jones Day, first published in 2005. The team walked through the lease clause by clause, looking for opportunities to change language long-accepted as common practice.
The result, the new BOMA Green Lease Guide, walks you through the complex language of commercial real estate leases so that you can…
- Maintain a green building through operations and management practices.
- Educate brokers and prospective tenants about what it means to occupy a high performance green building.
- Communicate the responsibilities of all parties in the ongoing efforts to keep the building green.
Enforceable Tenant Responsibilities
Terms of the lease presented in the BOMA Green Lease Guide incentivize tenants to reduce consumption of energy, water and materials, produce less waste, recycle as much as possible, and choose energy efficient and environmentally friendly products, furnishings and office equipment. The lease also includes enforceable language, where appropriate, to ensure that the tenant complies with the building’s green practices.
Pass Through Capital Costs
The BOMA Green Lease Guide offers an alternative to the typical triple net lease, where the landlord pays for capital improvements but the tenants, who pay the utility bills, reap the benefits of energy savings. The language included in this document gives owners the right as standard procedure to pass through to tenants any capital costs that result in lower total operating costs. The new green language ensures that maintaining, managing, reporting, commissioning and re-commissioning the building to conform to a green certification or rating program is included in the pass through costs.
Green Certification Annotation
The BOMA Green Lease Guide is designed to be flexible to meet the needs of the specific building’s green building practices, and therefore is rating-system neutral. It does contain additional annotation provided by experts from the organizations involved in the three rating systems predominant in the United States at this time: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ENERGY STAR® program; the Green Building Initiative’s (GBI) Green Globes™ system; and the U.S. Green Building
Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™. For those participating in any of these three programs, this guide shows you where you will get credit toward your certification.
What’s Included?
Three documents are presented (i) a model form prime Lease Agreement, oriented towards office use but with annotations addressing retail and mixed-use concepts as well, (ii) a model form Sublease, and (iii) a model form Guaranty of Lease. The documents have been written to stand alone but can easily be used in any combination or as a complete set of three if necessary.
Hundreds of easy-to-read footnotes provide answers and suggestions to the toughest lease topics.
A BONUS CD-ROM provides modifiable copies of the Lease, Sublease and Guaranty of Lease, an invaluable resource when used in conjunction with the Lease Guide and appropriate legal advice.
