The next item that you will most likley encounter in your lease is a the desription of the rental rate.  There are several ways that this number can be expressed; annually, monthly, or as a total amount.

In the examples below we are only discussing the base rent. The base rent is the minimum rental amount for the leased space; it does not include expenses, additional rent or any pass throughs.  We will discuss these later, but for now, the base rent.

In the industry the rental rate is most often expessed in an annual rate per square foot; i.e. $12/sf.  What this means is that the tenant will pay a total annual base rent of $12 per square foot for each foot of the leased space. Ex: 1000sf space equals $!2,000 total annual base rent.

Sometimes the rent is expressed in a monthly bases, $1/sf. As the name implies, each month you will pay $1 for each square foot of the leased space.  Ex: 1000sf equals $1000 base rent per month.  You may have noticed that the the way to calculate the annual base rent into a monthly figure is to divide the annual base rent by 12. The two examples above the same, they are just expressed in different units, annual versus monthly.

The last method used is to just describe an monthly base rent number. Ex: Your rent is $998.50.    This is not usually prefered as it lends itself to some manipulation and what may look like a good total number may not be what the market is getting in the area. I would always break it down into an annual and monthly number before signing a lease which simply state the total rent amount.