Paul Leongas | What Commercial Tenants Actually Need from Their Landlord

Paul Leongas

A commercial lease is a legal document. The relationship behind it is something else entirely. Paul Leongas has been on both sides of that relationship, first as a tenant for over 25 years, and now as a developer and property manager through Axis Development Group in Park Ridge, Illinois. The view from each side looks completely different.

As a tenant operating The Curragh Irish Pub across Schaumburg, Edison Park, and Skokie, Leongas paid rent in buildings where the landlord treated the lease as the entire relationship. Maintenance request submitted. Maintenance request acknowledged a week later. Repair completed sometime after that, maybe. The building kept collecting rent whether the HVAC worked or not.

That model pushes operating costs onto the tenant. And it pushes good tenants out the door.

A Maintenance Call Is a Business Emergency

When a restaurant's walk-in cooler stops working on a Thursday, the tenant does not have until Monday to figure it out. The food inside that cooler has a shelf life measured in hours. Paul Leongas made those calls. He waited for callbacks that came the next business day. He absorbed the cost of spoiled inventory because the landlord classified a dead cooler as a non-emergency.

Now, managing his own commercial properties across Chicago's North Shore, Leongas runs maintenance differently. A call about a mechanical failure gets same-day attention. Not because it is good customer service, though it is. Because he remembers what it costs a business when the building stops functioning and the landlord does not treat it as urgent.

Preventive Maintenance Should Not Be the Tenant's Problem

Most commercial leases put day-to-day maintenance on the tenant and structural or major mechanical repairs on the landlord. In practice, the line between those categories gets blurry fast. A rooftop HVAC unit that the landlord has never serviced will fail. When it fails, the landlord will argue about whether the failure was caused by tenant misuse or deferred maintenance. The tenant will pay for emergency cooling while the argument drags on.

Paul Leongas schedules preventive maintenance on every property he manages. Filters get changed. Rooftop units get inspected. Drain lines get cleared before they back up. The cost of prevention is a fraction of the cost of emergency repair. The cost of losing a tenant who got tired of fighting the building is higher than both.

The Building Should Stay Out of the Tenant's Way

A commercial tenant's job is running their business. Not managing a building. Not babysitting an HVAC system. Not reminding the landlord that the parking lot lights have been out for three weeks. Every hour a tenant spends dealing with building problems is an hour they are not spending on customers, inventory, or growth.

Leongas operated restaurants for roughly 12 years per location. He earned the Guinness Gold Standard Award for the Perfect Pint in 2002 and recognition from Whisky Magazine, all while managing building problems that should never have reached his desk. A restaurant operator should be thinking about food and service. A retail operator should be thinking about merchandise and customers. The landlord's job is to make the building invisible.

Fair Lease Terms Keep Tenants. Gotcha Clauses Lose Them.

Paul Leongas has read enough commercial leases to know where the problems hide. Triple-net terms that put every conceivable expense on the tenant. CAM charges that increase without cap or explanation. Renewal options that give the landlord all the power and the tenant none. These clauses maximize short-term income and destroy long-term occupancy.

Through Axis Development Group, Leongas structures leases based on what he would have wanted as a tenant. Clear terms. Reasonable allocation of maintenance responsibility. Renewal options that reward tenants who stay and maintain their spaces. He does this because he spent 25 years on the other side of bad leases, and he knows exactly what drives good tenants to leave.

The best landlord is the one the tenant barely thinks about. The building works. The maintenance happens. The lease is fair. Everything else is the tenant's business. Paul Leongas manages properties that way because he knows what it feels like when nobody does.