Maria had a lease in front of her for the space her business needed. Ten years of her working life were going to be decided by a document someone else drafted, and the expectation in the room was that she’d sign it.
Commercial tenants have more room than residential ones, not less. Longer terms, bigger dollars, more variables to trade — free rent, build-out allowance, escalation caps, renewal options, who pays for what when the roof goes. Almost none of it is fixed. And almost every woman I know who signed one signed it close to as written, because nobody had ever told her the number was an opening position.
That’s why this section covers two things that look unrelated and aren’t.
The commercial lease. What’s actually negotiable, what a landlord’s economics look like on retail or office space, what a personal guarantee means and how to limit one, and what to do when your business outgrows the space or doesn’t survive it.
Income property. Two to four units, which is where a lot of people should start and gets skipped because it isn’t glamorous enough to sell a course about. How to underwrite it without kidding yourself. What Section 8 actually requires from a landlord, treated as the business it is rather than the last resort or the gold mine it gets sold as. When to hire a property manager and when you’re just avoiding a phone call. How to walk away from a deal you already told people about.
The through-line is the same one running through everything here: the person across the table has done this before and you haven’t, and that gap is closable.
Nothing here is advice about your specific situation. All of it is meant to make you harder to sell to.
Eve
Everything’s Negotiable.
Eve Moss, Founder, Women + Real Estate™ womenplusrealestate.com
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