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The Franklin Rental You Almost Bought Without Seeing the Lease You're three days from closing on a duplex off Columbia Avenue, the numbers pencil out, b...
You're three days from closing on a duplex off Columbia Avenue, the numbers pencil out, both units are occupied, and the rent roll the seller handed over looks clean. Then somebody asks the question that saves the whole deal: "Have you actually read the leases?" Not the summary. Not the rent roll. The signed leases, all of them, cover page to signature line.
That gap between "the property has tenants" and "I know exactly what those tenants agreed to" is where a lot of Franklin acquisitions quietly go sideways. The building doesn't change on closing day. The leases you inherit do become your problem, and they're the one part of the deal a spreadsheet can't tell you.
A rent roll is a summary someone typed up. It tells you unit, tenant, rent, and maybe a lease-end date. What it almost never tells you is everything the tenant is actually entitled to, and that's the part you're buying.
Say the rent roll shows $1,650 a month on a unit in a neighborhood off Hillsboro Road. Fair enough. But the signed lease might say rent is locked at that number for two more years with no escalation clause, even though the market around it has moved. It might say the landlord covers water and trash, or that the tenant got a verbal promise about a fence that never made it into writing but sits in an email thread the seller "forgot" to mention. The rent roll shows you the number. The lease shows you the deal, and the deal is what transfers.
When you take title to an occupied Franklin property, Tennessee law generally carries the existing leases forward. You step into the landlord's shoes on the terms already signed. So the fine print isn't fine print, it's the operating agreement for your new asset.
A few things worth finding before you're the owner:
Here's the move that separates a hopeful buyer from a protected one. You ask each tenant to sign an estoppel certificate, a short document where the tenant confirms in their own words what they're paying, when the lease ends, what deposit they've put down, and whether they believe the landlord owes them anything.
An estoppel does two things at once. It catches discrepancies while you can still do something about them, and it prevents a tenant from later claiming a term the seller never disclosed. If the lease says $1,650 and the tenant signs an estoppel confirming $1,650, that argument is closed before you own the building. On residential deals estoppels are optional but smart. On commercial acquisitions in Franklin, they're close to standard, and a lender may require them.
A residential lease off Del Rio Pike runs a page or two and follows a familiar shape. A commercial lease for a retail or office space near downtown Franklin can run twenty-plus pages and rewire your economics. Who pays taxes, insurance, and common area maintenance? Is it a gross lease, a modified gross, a triple net? Is there a co-tenancy clause that lets your anchor tenant reduce rent if a neighbor goes dark? Those aren't details. They're the difference between the cap rate you underwrote and the one you'll actually earn.
We've watched otherwise clean commercial deals shift meaningfully once the actual lease came into view, not because anyone was hiding anything, but because a summary genuinely can't hold that much nuance. The lease has to be read. There's no shortcut.
When we represent you on an acquisition, reading the leases isn't a courtesy step we get to if there's time. It's built into how we evaluate the deal. We request every signed lease and amendment during due diligence, not a rent roll standing in for them. We compare what's written to what's being collected. We flag renewal options, below-market locks, deposit gaps, and side promises before those things become yours. And we push for estoppels so the terms are confirmed by the people actually living or operating under them.
The point isn't to talk you out of a property. Most of the time the leases confirm exactly what the seller represented, and you close with full confidence instead of crossed fingers. Occasionally they don't, and finding that out three days before closing is a very different experience than finding it out three months after.
You wouldn't buy a business without reading its contracts. An occupied rental is a small business with contracts attached, and the leases are those contracts. Read them first. Or let us read them with you, which is rather the point of having a partner on the acquisition in the first place.