negotiation. "It gets a little bit tougher when you're looking at a lease
Milletto agreed that the better the property, the harder the
for a location that you know is that A-plus-plus location," he said in his Coff ee Fest lecture. "But you still need to go in and sell yourself. You need to go in with moxie that, 'You know what, you need me. You need me in your location, and what I'm going to do for your center. I'm going to bring in a certain type of people, and I'm going to make it easier for you to lease the other 22 spaces here.
'"
HOW LONG IS TOO LONG? Of course, before you can tell if a given space is what you
want, you have to know what you want. One of the most basic terms is the length of the lease. Phil Armstrong, principal of Mackintosh Realtors of Frederick, Md., and treasurer of the National Association of Realtors, says beginners should probably avoid a long-term lease. "If I were looking for a lease to be in the coff ee retail business
and I was basically just starting out, I believe I would look at something where the landlord is not adamant about too long- term a commitment," Armstrong says. "You want to go in there positive, but at the same time, you don't want to commit to fi ve years or ten years where you could only do two or three with an option to expand.
If the business takes off , a long-term lease handcuff s the café owner to the property. Other decisions depend on what's inside the shop—what's
everything in place just the way you want it—and few of them are—you will have to make a decision: Do you want to pay the landlord to make whatever improvements are necessary, or do you want a plain "vanilla shell" that you can furnish as you see fi t?
already there, and what you need. Depending on your circumstances, the best thing the landlord can give you in that regard might be nothing. Unless the property is a ready-to-move-in coff ee shop with
VANILLA FAN Herman is a big fan of the vanilla shell. Doing your own
improvements not only gives you more control, but is usually cheaper than letting the landlord do it, he says. If the property owner makes the improvements, "they can charge you whatever they want,
" Th is isn't just a hedge against failure:
ask for both a bare-bones price with no improvements, which can serve as a basis of comparison, and about landlord-fi nanced improvements. Especially if the lease is longer-term, a landlord might be willing to build the price of the improvements into the monthly lease and, in eff ect, recapture it over the lease's
" Herman says. "You're held hostage to the landlord." Armstrong says renters should keep their options open and
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