The request for proposal is the first document that separates serious landlords from optimistic ones, and most RFPs waste that leverage by asking about square footage and asking rent when the real answers are buried in operating cost structure, lease flexibility, and capital commitment. These 9 Questions Every Office RFP Should Ask a Landlord are drawn from tenant representation practice and are designed to surface the information that actually drives deal-execution decisions — before you spend time and legal fees negotiating with the wrong building.
Question One: What Is the All-In Occupancy Cost, Not Just the Base Rent?
Base rent is a headline, not a budget line. The number that matters is effective occupancy cost per usable square foot per year, which means you need gross rent, estimated operating expense pass-throughs, real estate tax escalations, and any above-standard utility charges all in one column before you can compare properties fairly.
Ask landlords to provide their current-year operating expense budget and the three-year history of actual expenses. Buildings with aging mechanical systems, deferred maintenance, or single-tenant floors that skew common area ratios can carry operating expenses that swing occupancy cost by ten to twenty percent compared with a newer or better-managed asset, even when base rents look similar.
The RFP should also request the landlord's expense stop or base year figure and whether it represents actual prior-year expenses or a stipulated amount. A stipulated base year set below actual expenses creates immediate pass-through exposure from day one of the lease, which is a structural cost the rent schedule will not reveal.
Finally, ask for the building's most recent independent audit of operating expenses if available, and clarify whether the landlord uses a gross-up provision to normalize expenses to full occupancy. Gross-up clauses affect what you pay in a partially occupied building and should be understood before you model any scenario.
Question Two: What Capital Improvements Has the Landlord Committed to the Building?
A landlord's capital plan tells you whether the asset is being invested in or harvested for yield. Ask specifically what base-building improvements have been completed in the last three years, what is budgeted in the next three, and whether any deferred capital items — roofing, elevators, HVAC plant, facade — have been identified by an independent property condition assessment.
Buildings with aging infrastructure shift risk to tenants through operating expense escalations over time. If a landlord cannot or will not share a capital expenditure schedule, that is itself a data point. Best-practice RFPs ask for the most recent property condition report or engineer's assessment, which larger institutional owners typically maintain.
The capital question also covers tenant improvement funding. Ask for the landlord's standard tenant improvement allowance range per rentable square foot for direct construction, and whether that figure is for turnkey delivery or for tenant-managed construction. The delivery model affects your project timeline, cost exposure, and who carries construction risk.
Question Three: How Is the Building's Rentable Area Calculated?
Loss factor is one of the most consequential variables in a lease comparison and one of the most frequently obscured. Ask every landlord to state their add-on factor or load factor percentage, the measurement standard they use (BOMA 2017, BOMA 2010, ANSI, or a proprietary method), and whether the stated rentable square footage has been independently verified.
A twelve-percent difference in loss factor between two buildings is a twelve-percent difference in rent for identical usable space. When an RFP does not ask this question explicitly, landlords who use aggressive measurement standards gain a silent pricing advantage that only surfaces during space planning or lease audit.
Your RFP should also ask for a floor plan with the usable and rentable areas clearly marked, and request that the landlord confirm whether common area measurements include any amenity or lobby space that is not proportionately used by tenants on that floor. Floor-by-floor loss factors vary in multi-tenant buildings, and your specific floor may differ from the building average quoted in a marketing summary.
Question Four: What Lease Flexibility and Contraction Rights Are Available?
Office requirements change. Headcount projections made at lease signing have a track record of diverging from reality within the first three years, and the lease structure needs to account for that. Ask every landlord whether the building can accommodate contraction rights, expansion rights on adjacent or contiguous space, and early termination options, and ask for the standard economic terms attached to each.
Contraction and termination rights typically require penalty payments — often calculated as a multiple of unamortized tenant improvement allowance and leasing commissions plus a specified number of months of base rent. Knowing those parameters upfront lets you model the real cost of flexibility before you commit to a ten-year term in a building whose contiguous expansion space is already leased to another tenant.
Expansion rights should be defined precisely: a right of first refusal on adjacent space is materially different from a right of first offer, and both are different from a fixed-price expansion option. The RFP should ask which type the landlord will grant and whether the expansion right applies to any contiguous space or only to a specific suite or floor identified in the lease.
Question Five: What Is the Landlord's Ownership Structure and Financing Status?
A lease is a long-term contractual relationship with a counterparty, and that counterparty's financial and ownership stability directly affects your occupancy experience. Ask whether the building is owned outright, subject to a mortgage, or held in a joint venture structure, and ask the landlord to identify the asset manager or owner entity you would be dealing with throughout the term.
Buildings with significant debt service and high near-term loan maturities carry refinancing risk that can affect capital availability for tenant improvements, building operations, and landlord obligations. Publicly available mortgage information, property records, and lender press releases can verify what a landlord discloses, but the RFP question establishes transparency as a baseline expectation.
Also ask whether the building is on the market for sale or whether the ownership group has a stated hold period. A building acquired or sold mid-lease changes your contact relationships, approval chains for alterations and assignments, and potentially the financial capacity of the incoming landlord to perform capital obligations inherited from the prior owner.
Question Six: What Are the Building's Sustainability Certifications and Energy Performance Data?
Energy and sustainability performance affects both occupancy cost and corporate reporting obligations. Ask for the building's current ENERGY STAR score, any LEED certification level, and actual utility consumption data for the last two years expressed in kilowatt-hours per square foot per year. These are verifiable figures, not marketing claims.
If your organization has greenhouse gas reporting requirements or science-based targets, the RFP should ask whether the landlord provides submetered electricity data at the tenant level, whether a green lease rider is available, and whether the landlord has a published decarbonization plan with specific milestones. Buildings with high-efficiency mechanical systems and renewable energy procurement often show total energy cost advantages that offset higher base rents in direct occupancy cost comparisons.
Sustainable building operation also affects talent and workplace experience conversations internally. Asking the question in the RFP establishes that it is a scored criterion, which motivates landlords to provide documentation rather than a marketing summary. Landlords who cannot provide an ENERGY STAR score or measured energy data for a building of meaningful size should prompt further inquiry about metering and reporting infrastructure.
Question Seven: What Technology Infrastructure Does the Building Provide?
Connectivity is now load-bearing infrastructure for most office occupiers. Ask every landlord to provide the building's current WiredScore certification level if applicable, the number and names of internet service providers with physical presence in the building, and whether the landlord provides carrier-neutral meet-me room access or controls connectivity through a single provider arrangement.
Buildings with a single-provider arrangement for internet connectivity introduce vendor risk that affects service quality, pricing leverage, and failover redundancy. For many tenants, the discovery that only one carrier serves the building — made after lease signing — requires expensive workarounds including dedicated fiber drops that were not anticipated in the construction budget.
The technology question should also cover distributed antenna systems for cellular coverage, building access control protocols and whether they are compatible with common visitor management platforms, and whether the building's power infrastructure supports high-density computing loads if that is relevant to your operations. These are specifications, not amenities, and the RFP is the right place to establish them as requirements.
Question Eight: What Are the Landlord's Terms for Assignment, Subletting, and Change of Control?
Assignment and sublease provisions define your exit optionality for the entire lease term. Ask each landlord to provide their standard lease language on subletting — specifically whether landlord consent is required, what grounds the landlord may use to withhold consent, and whether the landlord retains any recapture right that would allow them to take back the space instead of approving a sublease.
Recapture clauses can effectively eliminate sublease optionality by giving the landlord the right to terminate your lease and re-let the space directly whenever you want to sublet. That provision matters enormously in a market downturn when sublease income might be the only mechanism keeping occupancy cost within budget. Knowing the landlord's position before shortlisting avoids investing legal resources in a building whose standard lease makes subletting functionally impossible.
Change-of-control provisions are equally important for any company that may be acquired, merge, or restructure. Ask whether a corporate restructuring, merger, or acquisition constitutes an assignment requiring landlord consent, and what documentation the landlord requires. Some lease forms treat any change in controlling ownership interest as a triggering event, which creates landlord leverage at exactly the moment when operational continuity is most critical.
Question Nine: What Are the Landlord's Standard Lease Terms for Rent Abatement, Free Rent, and Commencement?
The economic structure of a lease's first year has long-run consequences that the rent schedule alone does not show. Ask every landlord to state their standard free rent period, whether abated rent is contingent on the tenant not defaulting (a clawback risk), and how the lease commencement date is defined — whether it triggers on a fixed calendar date, on landlord's delivery of the space, or on receipt of a temporary certificate of occupancy.
Commencement date risk is real and underappreciated. If the lease commences on a fixed date but the space is not ready, tenants in markets with standard landlord-friendly forms may face a situation where rent obligation begins before they can occupy. The RFP should ask explicitly whether the landlord will agree to a delayed commencement tied to actual delivery, and whether liquidated damages or additional free rent apply if delivery is late.
Free rent structures also vary in how they interact with operating expenses. Some landlords abate base rent only, leaving tenants responsible for operating expenses and real estate taxes during the free period. Others offer gross-free-rent periods that include all pass-throughs. The difference can represent a meaningful variance in first-year occupancy cost and should be part of every structured proposal comparison.
Scoring the Responses: Building a Comparable Framework
Receiving nine different landlord responses to these questions only helps if you can compare them on a consistent basis. The standard approach is a weighted-criteria scoring matrix that assigns point values to each question category based on their importance to your specific requirements. A tenant with five years of remaining lease on a sublease portfolio will weight assignment flexibility higher; a tenant with aggressive growth projections will weight expansion rights more heavily.
Labelling these as hypothetical models rather than forecasts keeps them honest and defensible in internal approvals.
Buildings that could not answer the capital improvement question or refused to provide energy data should carry a flag in your scoring notes, because the pattern of non-disclosure during a competitive RFP typically reflects the same posture you will encounter during lease administration.
Why Landlords Respect a Well-Structured RFP
A landlord who receives a vague RFP understands that the tenant's adviser is either inexperienced or not fully engaged. A landlord who receives a structured RFP covering operating cost methodology, capital plans, ownership stability, sustainability metrics, and lease flexibility understands they are dealing with a prepared counterparty and that their response will be compared against competing proposals on a consistent basis.
That signal changes behavior. Landlords who want the deal move faster on disclosures, provide more complete documentation, and are more willing to negotiate non-economic terms — assignment provisions, recapture rights, commencement definitions — because they know those items are on the scorecard.
The nine questions in this article are not exhaustive, but they cover the domains where information asymmetry is most likely to disadvantage the tenant if left to the lease negotiation stage.
Connecting the RFP to the Broader Portfolio Decision
Organizations that treat each transaction as isolated lose the institutional knowledge that makes the next negotiation faster and better informed.
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