We have written here before about important things to consider when purchasing a restaurant, and we have also written about exclusivity provisions in restaurant leases. A recent deal we were working on, however, has highlighted how those two topics work together – and demonstrated a hidden danger for restaurant purchasers that can be hidden in restaurant leases.
As part of our legal assistance of any restaurant purchaser one of the most important things that we do is review the existing lease that will be assigned to the buyer. The quality of the restaurant’s lease, after all, bears an outsized relationship to whether the restaurant succeeds, and how bad things can be for the owner if it does not. Understanding the lease you are inheriting in a restaurant purchase is therefore critical.
In this case, our client was purchasing a restaurant that specialized in a specific type of food – for the purposes of this discussion, let’s say it was a Korean restaurant. We were therefore initially pleased to see that the lease contained an exclusivity provision whereby the landlord was restricted from leasing space in the shopping center to any other restaurant that sold Korean food. That initial pleasure wore off, however, when we noted two other provisions: first, that the tenant would lose that right of exclusivity upon any event of default; and second (and of particular importance in our case), the exclusivity would not survive assignment of the lease. We were able to quickly confirm and get assurance (supported by the appropriate documents of course) that there had been no prior defaults, but we still had to address the assignment issue or our client would be buying a Korean restaurant, but would be taking over without a built-in advantage that the current owner enjoyed.
Thankfully, in this case, the landlord agreed – as part of the assignment – to extend the same exclusivity provisions to the buyer that it did to the seller. It should provide a cautionary tale, however, on the importance of a detailed lease review by a knowledgeable attorney. Had we not reviewed the lease, and paid attention to this provision, our client would have been exposed and vulnerable were this landlord (or a subsequent landlord) to later decide to lease space in the shopping center to another Korean restaurant — perhaps a national chain or hot new fast casual place. Maybe it would never have happened, but when you are investing in the purchase of a restaurant, especially a particular type of restaurant, there is no reason to take that chance.