Cumulative CAM Cap and Your Commercial Lease

By: Justin Daniels,
Posted: Monday, May 12th, 2008, 1:39 pm EST
Category: Real Estate News



My name is Justin Daniels, a local commercial real estate lawyer in Atlanta. Brad Nix asked me to pen a quick legal post on important legal issues that comes up in commercial Leases.
I came across a situation you should be aware and try to avoid or mitigate when negotiating your office or retail lease. Common Area Maintenance (CAM) are the charges landlords typically pass through to tenants for their office or retail space (etc. parking lot repaving or utilities for the hallway lights). You should always negotiate to cap inevitable increases in these charges or you can be obligated to pay the entire increase. A variation on this theme, however, is a cumulative cap over the term of the lease. You should be aware that this cumulative cap allows the landlord to pass along to you CAM increases in later years of the lease that it did not capture in the early years of the lease.
 
This is best explained in an example. Lets say you negotiate for a 5% cumulative cap. In year one your CAM goes up 2%. In the next year, the landlord can recover 8% in CAM increases from you because they get 5% per year and the three percent (5% - 2%) they did not use in the prior year. For tenants leasing significant square footage, this can add up to a significant expense for which you are unaware and have not have budgeted.
 
This situation can be handled as follows:
 
1) Refuse a cumulative cap.
 
2) If you cannot eliminate it, get a percentage number by which CAM can never increase for each year of the lease (i.e. CAM can never go up more than 7% in any given year).
 
As always your trusted resource for practical legal advice, have a great week. If you want more information please contact me at 404-261-0500.

Maxsell Real Estate gets vote of confidence from Google

By: Brad Nix, Managing Broker
Posted: Thursday, May 1st, 2008, 7:29 am EST
Category: Real Estate News



Maxsell Page Rank

At Maxsell Real Estate, we believe the future of real estate marketing is on the internet.  Maxsell has been an industry leader for web marketing in Metro Atlanta for the past three years and this week we received another vote of confidence from Google.  Maxsell.net moved up to a PageRank 5 for our home page and a PageRank 4 for our blog page.  Many of our larger local competitors do not even have a Page Rank of 2 for the real estate website.

Google describes PageRank:
“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

In other words, many other websites and many “important” websites think Maxsell.net is valuable to the consumer as a real estate authority in Metro Atlanta.  All of our clients benefit from Maxsell’s gain in prominence as more links and more visitors mean more buyers viewing your property listed by Maxsell Real Estate.

Thanks to all of our subscribed readers (new visitors should subscribe now) and the thousands of websites who have linked to Maxsell.  We would not be successful without you!

Maxsell Real Estate ranks as one of the Top Real Estate Blogs

By: Brad Nix, Managing Broker
Posted: Wednesday, April 16th, 2008, 7:54 pm EST
Category: Real Estate News



Jon Washburn, Co-Founder of Active Rain (the largest and fastest growing social network specifically focused on the real estate industry), recently published the Inaugural Real Estate Top Blog Index: March 2008.  Maxsell Real Estate came in at #35 on the top 81 list.  Maxsell was originally #29, but slid to #35 after Jon received some updates from other sites.

There are many high-quality real estate blogs listed below us on the list (and many above).  I consider it an honor to be on the same list as all of these bloggers.  Here is Jon’s crieteria…

The Rules:

  1. Blog must be about real estate.
  2. The URL must be ranked individually on Alexa and Compete. (For instance a blog address of sethgodin.typepad.com would not be allowed because the typepad.com domain is the site that is being ranked. This applies to all inside ActiveRain blogs as well; sorry.)
  3. The blog must drive the majority of traffic to the domain name. (For instance although Bloodhoundrealty.com is a real estate brokerage, it is my opinion that the Bloodhound blog drives a majority of the sites traffic.)

Thanks to each of our readers, contributers, partners and link-givers for putting Maxsell Real Estate on the web 2.0 map!

2 Comments

REtechSouth Video Recap

By: Brad Nix, Managing Broker
Posted: Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008, 9:21 am EST
Category: Real Estate News



Rudy from Trulia has done an excellent job capturing the essence of REtechSouth on video! 

Check it out at  Trulia.com behind the Scenes at ReTechSouth.com

I will be sending an email recap today to everyone in attendance.  The email will include links to read all write-ups of the event, links to support all sponsors, and most importantly access to REtechSouth networking groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Active Rain.

2 Comments

Breaking News: CoStar set to buy Dorey

By: Brad Nix, Managing Broker
Posted: Tuesday, April 1st, 2008, 10:16 am EST
Category: Real Estate News



CoStar Group is one of the nation’s leading providers for commercial property data, listings and comps.  Today they are moving to acquire Atlanta’s oldest commercial property resources: Dorey Companies. 

This certainly narrows the competition for market dominance in Metro Atlanta down to LoopNet and CoStar.  As a commercial broker, I welcome the consolidation.  It is very hard to get accurate property data when having to research 3 sources.  Having only two commercial listing resources should help brokers and consumers alike when searching for the right commercial investment.

Stay tuned for more news as I receive details of the acquisition.

UPDATE:
CoStar is pushing this as a ‘partnership’ and billing it as "Atlanta’s ultimate online information source".  It will be an improvement through consolidation, but I’d love to see CoStar embrace more user-friendly interface maybe even throw some widgets or plugins to us brokers (a la LoopNet).

Costar is currently tracking 40,000 plus properties here in Metro Atlanta which will  now combine with Dorey’s 25,000 ish properties they track to yield almost 65,000 properties tracked.  There will be some overlap, but the combined results should far outweigh the two separate databases.

I also find it funny that CoStar has a press release dated 1998 about it’s agreement for data sharing and marketing with Dorey Companies:
http://www.costar.com/corporate/press/Release.aspx?c=2216&ekmensel=8_submenu_76_link_2

It’s good to see they finally followed through after 10 years. If this is not proof that the commercial real estate industry needs some modernization, then I don’t what is.

Read the Official Press Release