When companies acquire or merge with other competing or complementary firms, real estate is, as a part of the transaction, generally a small overall concern. However, we frequently see major risk being absorbed by the acquiring firm with potential for a very negative surprise down the road.
Here’s the error: Due diligence of the real estate is often relegated to their investment advisory firm and/or an M&A legal team to simply provide a cursory review of the legal terms of leased real estate without much attention to the business terms.
It becomes especially onerous when the selling principals have an ownership interest in the real estate and have either leased it back to their corporations, or will remain the owners of the property and lease it to the acquiring firm. Realize that any lease developed by principals for leaseback to their own corporations, while perhaps near “arms length” rental rates, generally places as much operating risk as possible onto the corporation tenant. They are often intentionally structured with maintenance and compliance requirements (replacement of roof or structural members, ADA or fire code improvements, environmental remediation) without ANY representation or warranties from the Landlord to the Tenant.
Certainly if it’s your corporation you can do whatever you want, but no intelligent or well-advised tenant would accept those terms in a market-competitive situation. Except when they are doing an acquisition, that is.
Once, we saw a lease that required the Tenant to pay a net rent equal to the Landlord’s mortgage payment and, in the event that the Landlord refinanced the property, the Tenant would be responsible for the adjusted payment and all closing costs related to the refinancing.
This gave the Landlord the ability to pull out as much equity as any lender would provide, at will and upon any terms or amortization schedule that they desired, and the Tenant was obligated to pay the cost. Unfortunately for our client, we were hired AFTER they had acquired the firm that was the Tenant from the former owner Landlord — and that is exactly what he had done.
It can be nearly as bad when the company is acquiring the business but not the real estate and doing a leaseback of the principal’s building. Inevitably, the seller’s attorney wants to prove themselves clever enough to insert equally risk-shifting strategies into the new lease document. Don’t allow it.
Here are three ways to protect yourself:
- Every lease on acquisition property should be treated with the same process that is applied to any new corporate lease.
- Make it clear from the earliest acquisition discussions that all leases from the target’s principals will be on your own fair and balanced standard lease form.
- If they already have leased the property back to their corporations, require that lease be terminated at closing and the new one take effect. Their attorneys will fight it of course, so make this a deal-killer absolute up front in the negotiations. It will prevent unreasonable risk being shifted to your firm.
