Retail space for lease and retail buildings for sale

MDOT publishes annual average daily traffic for state routes, and a 30,000-count road sounds better than a 12,000-count road until you look at whether anybody can turn left into the center. Median cuts, deceleration lanes and the signal timing at the nearest intersection change the value of a count more than the count itself.

Walk the site at the hour your customers would come. A retail location that works at 10am and fails at 5:30pm is a common and expensive discovery.

A co-tenancy clause gives you a remedy — reduced rent, or the right to leave — if the anchor goes dark. Without one you are paying anchor-adjacent rent for a center with a boarded anchor. Landlords resist it; it is still the single most valuable clause a small tenant can win.

An exclusive stops the landlord leasing to your direct competitor in the same center. Write it by what is sold, not by trade name: "no other tenant may derive more than 15% of gross sales from coffee" survives a rebrand in a way that "no other coffee shop" does not.

Your occupancy cost is base rent plus CAM plus taxes plus insurance plus percentage rent, measured against your projected sales. Most retail concepts break somewhere between 8% and 12% of gross sales; if the deal in front of you needs 15%, no amount of negotiating the base rate fixes it.

Cap controllable CAM at 4% to 5% annually, cumulative, and exclude capital items — a new roof and a repaved lot are the landlord’s asset, not your operating expense.