A broker we know missed a renewal-option notice deadline last spring. Their tenant — a 14-year occupant of a Class-A medical office — lost the option, and the landlord re-papered the lease at +27% market. The renewal was buried in Section 32(d), six pages into the rider, referenced from Section 3.2. The notice window was 270 days. The tenant's last reminder was a sticky note that fell behind a file cabinet.
Every commercial lease is a calendar in disguise. The legalese hides dates that, if missed, cost real money — sometimes the entire deal. Most abstracts surface the obvious ones (commencement, expiration, rent steps) and quietly drop the ones that bite later. Here's the full list of dates worth tracking, organized the way an abstract's critical-date schedule should be.
Term & renewals — 5 dates
1. Lease commencement
Cost of missing:The clock for every other date in the lease starts here.
Sometimes called the “effective date”, sometimes the “rent commencement date”, and they're often different. Free-rent periods can shift one without the other.
2. Lease expiration
Cost of missing:Holdover at 150–200% of rent if you blow past it.
Stated plainly, but check Section 1 against any extension amendments — exhibits often govern.
3. Renewal-option notice deadlines
Cost of missing:Renewal evaporates. Tenant either renegotiates from weakness or moves out.
Usually 9–12 months before expiration, sometimes earlier on long-term leases. Each option has its own notice window. Multiple renewal options each have their own.
4. Renewal-option exercise dates
Cost of missing:If the tenant misses the formal exercise mechanic — written notice, signature requirements — the option fails even if intent was clear.
5. Holdover trigger
Cost of missing:Determines when month-to-month at penalty rent kicks in. Often 30 days after expiration with cure rights, sometimes immediate.
Rent — 4 dates
6. Rent escalation dates
Cost of missing:An unbilled escalation can sit on the books for years before audit, eating cash flow on the landlord side.
Annual or every-X-years; some leases use CPI, some fixed steps, some indexed to a third metric. Each has a calculation date.
7. CAM / OpEx reconciliation deadline
Cost of missing:Landlord misses the deadline, the tenant has grounds to refuse the bill.
Usually 60–90 days after fiscal year end. Tenants get an audit right that runs from this date.
8. Rent commencement vs. occupancy
Cost of missing:Tenant may take possession early to fit out, but the rent meter shouldn't run until the date the lease defines.
9. Free-rent expiration
Cost of missing:Easy to miss when bookkeeping flips from $0 to full rent in a single month with no other trigger.
Defaults & cure — 5 dates
10. Tenant default cure period
Cost of missing:Counted from notice. Lose the cure window, lose possession.
Usually 10 days for monetary, 30 days for non-monetary. Section 18 in most forms.
11. Landlord default cure period
Cost of missing:Tenant remedy options unlock — self-help, offset, sometimes termination.
12. Casualty restoration deadline
Cost of missing:If the landlord can't restore by the deadline, the tenant typically gets a termination right.
Often 180–270 days after the casualty, depending on extent of damage.
13. Force-majeure cure window
Cost of missing:A pandemic, a hurricane, a permitting delay — these tee off a cure clock that can stop other clocks elsewhere in the lease.
14. Estoppel-certificate deadline
Cost of missing:Tenant deemed to have certified everything in the requested estoppel if no response in time. This shows up in financings.
Usually 10 business days from request.
Termination triggers — 4 dates
15. Tenant termination-option dates
Cost of missing:Some leases let the tenant exit at year 5 of a 10-year term with a fee. Notice is usually 12+ months before.
16. Co-tenancy fail dates
Cost of missing:In retail, this can drop tenant rent to a percentage-rent floor or trigger termination.
The clock starts when an anchor or specified co-tenant goes dark.
17. Go-dark threshold dates
Cost of missing:Triggers landlord recapture rights, percentage-rent guarantees, or co-tenancy failures downstream.
18. Casualty-termination election
Cost of missing:Both parties usually get an election right inside a 60–90 day window after the event.
Three more that quietly matter
19. OpEx audit-right window
Cost of missing:Tenant misses it, last year's reconciliation locks in even if it was wrong.
Typically 12–24 months after the reconciliation statement.
20. Right-of-first-refusal / right-of-first-offer expiration
Cost of missing:ROFR/ROFO rights commonly expire on a hard date. Tenants forget. Landlords forget. Then the deal closes around them.
21. SNDA / subordination acknowledgment deadline
Cost of missing:Lender financings stall if the tenant doesn't sign within the window. Tenants in turn miss carve-outs they could have negotiated.
Why most abstracts miss half of these
The first ten of these are commonly captured. The rest live in riders, exhibits, and amendment chains that human abstractors rationally skip when the budget is six hours per lease. The renewal-option deadline that cost our broker $3.4M of net effective rent? It was on page 47 of an 89-page lease, in a font two points smaller than the body. A junior associate had abstracted the document into a spreadsheet that captured 18 of the 21 dates above. The renewal notice was one of the three missing.
This is the case that LLM extraction was built for. The model reads the entire document end-to-end, not just the predictable sections, and grounds every date back to a specific clause so you can verify in two seconds. Section 32(d) on page 47, with a link straight to the citation.
A good lease abstract isn't a Cliff's Notes — it's a calendar your portfolio system can subscribe to. If yours doesn't surface all 21 of these dates, you're carrying risk that a single 60-second extraction would erase.