One More Step To Take When Signing A Lease

When a building owner and a tenant sign a lease, the second to last step usually consists of the tenant’s signing the lease and returning it to the owner. Then the owner countersigns and returns the countersigned lease to the tenant. Each party puts the fully signed lease in their file and the parties go live their real estate lives.

A recent New York case indicates that a property owner needs to do something more if it wants to be able to enforce the lease against the tenant. It’s not enough for the property owner to be able to show that the tenant signed the lease and the property owner has a copy of the signed lease. Instead, the property owner also needs to show that the tenant received a copy of the final signed lease. That usually happens automatically whenever the parties sign a lease, of course, especially if attorneys are involved. But sometimes it doesn’t happen, so a property owner won’t necessarily have actual proof that it happened. The recent case suggests that any property owner ought to create and keep that proof in the file.