You signed a lease so you could run your business. Instead you are reading it at midnight, trying to figure out whether the landlord can really charge you for a roof you never asked for, whether that three-day notice on your door is valid, or whether the personal guaranty you signed two years ago is about to follow you home.
That is exactly where I come in.
My name is Alex Murad, and I am a California-licensed attorney based in Ojai. I represent commercial tenants across Ventura County: the shop on the corner, the restaurant with eight employees, the contractor in a warehouse bay, the nonprofit in donated-rate office space, and the grower leasing ground. My practice is built around the tenant’s side of the table, and commercial tenancy is a natural extension of that work.
A commercial lease is not a form. It is the single largest contract most small businesses ever sign, and it is written by the landlord’s lawyer to protect the landlord. You are allowed to push back. You are allowed to have someone read it before you sign it. And if the relationship has already gone sideways, you are allowed to fight.
Commercial Tenants Do Not Get the Protections Residential Renters Get
I want to start with the hard part, because you deserve a straight answer before you spend money on a lawyer.
Almost every tenant protection people have heard of in California is residential only. The implied warranty of habitability does not apply to commercial space. The statewide rent cap and just cause rules under the Tenant Protection Act do not apply to commercial space. The retaliation statute that protects renters who complain about repairs does not apply to commercial space. If your roof leaks onto your inventory, there is no state agency to call and no code enforcement officer who will make it stop.
In commercial tenancy, your rights come from three places: the lease you signed, a much smaller set of statutes written specifically for commercial property, and the general law of contracts. That is a narrower toolbox. It is not an empty one.
What that reality means in practice is simple. The leverage in a commercial tenancy is front-loaded. What you negotiate before you sign matters far more than what you argue about afterward, and the money you spend on an hour of review before signing is usually the cheapest money you will ever spend on this space.
Before You Sign: Lease Review and Negotiation
Landlords and brokers hand out leases that look standard. Most of them are heavily modified, and the modifications are rarely in your favor. Here is what I read for.
What the Rent Actually Is
The base rent is the number everyone talks about. The number that hurts is everything stacked on top of it: common area maintenance, taxes, insurance, management fees, and capital repairs disguised as maintenance. A triple net lease can quietly add thirty percent or more to what you thought you agreed to pay. I look for caps on controllable expenses, exclusions for capital improvements and roof and structure work, a defined base year, and the right to audit the landlord’s numbers.
The Personal Guaranty
This is the clause that turns a business problem into a family problem. If you personally guarantee the lease, forming an LLC did nothing to protect your house or your savings for this obligation. Sometimes a guaranty is unavoidable. It can often be limited: capped at a set number of months, burned off after a period of on-time payment, or released on assignment. Nobody offers those terms. You have to ask.
Use, Exclusivity, and Whether You Can Legally Operate
A permitted use clause written too narrowly can block you from changing your business model later. A missing exclusivity clause lets the landlord rent the next suite to your competitor. And a lease that assumes you can get a conditional use permit, a health permit, or an ABC license is a lease that can leave you paying rent on a space you cannot legally open. Contingencies belong in the lease, not in your hopes.
Repairs, Systems, and Who Owns the Roof
Many commercial leases put the HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roof, and even structural repairs on the tenant. That is legal. It is also how a small business ends up buying a landlord a new roof in year two. At minimum you want the landlord to warrant that the systems work on delivery, a cap on your share of major repairs, and structure and foundation expressly excluded.
Disability Access and the CASp Disclosure
California requires a commercial landlord to tell you in the lease whether the property has been inspected by a Certified Access Specialist, and to give you the report if it has. Most tenants skim past this and later discover the lease makes them responsible for bringing the premises into compliance after an access lawsuit lands. Ventura County businesses get hit with these suits regularly. Read that clause before you sign it, not after.
The Exit
Nobody wants to talk about leaving on the day they sign. Talk about it anyway. Assignment and sublease rights, an option to extend with a defined rent mechanism, a termination right if a contingency fails, and clear restoration obligations at the end of the term are worth more than a month of free rent, and they are far easier to get before you sign than after.
New Protections for Small Business Tenants in California
This is the part most small business owners in Ventura County have never heard, and it can be worth real money.
Effective January 1, 2025, California created a protected category called a qualified commercial tenant. You may qualify if your business is a microenterprise, generally a business with five or fewer employees that lacks ready access to conventional bank financing, or a restaurant with fewer than ten employees, or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with fewer than twenty employees.
If you qualify, the law gives you protections that look a lot like residential ones. On a month-to-month or shorter tenancy, a rent increase of ten percent or less requires thirty days written notice, and an increase above ten percent requires ninety days. Ending that kind of tenancy generally requires sixty days notice, or thirty days if you have been there less than a year. If the lease was negotiated primarily in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, or Korean, the landlord must give you a translation in that language before you sign.
The strongest piece concerns building operating costs. A landlord passing those costs through to a qualified commercial tenant must allocate them proportionately and be able to substantiate the method, must limit them to costs incurred in the previous eighteen months or reasonably expected in the next twelve, must exclude anything you already paid directly or that was reimbursed by insurance or a third party, and must provide supporting documentation within thirty days of your written request. A landlord who has not provided that documentation is not supposed to be charging you those costs at all. You cannot be made to waive these protections.
The remedies have teeth. A violation can support actual damages, attorney fees and costs, and if the landlord acted willfully or with oppression, fraud, or malice, treble damages and punitive damages. A violation can also be raised as a defense in an eviction case.
Here is the catch, and it is the reason most eligible businesses get nothing. These protections generally do not apply unless you give the landlord written notice that you are a qualified commercial tenant, along with a self-attestation of your employee count. For a fixed-term lease that means before or upon signing, and annually after that. For a month-to-month tenancy it means within the previous twelve months. If you have never sent that notice, you are likely leaving the protection on the table right now.
A word of caution. The operating cost rules reach leases signed, renewed, or commenced on or after January 1, 2025, periodic tenancies, and older leases that had no operating cost provision at all. Whether your particular lease is covered is a fact question, and it is one worth asking about.
Fights That Come Up During the Tenancy
Common area and operating expense overcharges. Landlords pass through costs the lease does not authorize, allocate them by a formula that shifts as vacancies change, or bill capital projects as routine maintenance. If your lease has an audit right, use it. If you are a qualified commercial tenant, you may have a statutory right to the documentation regardless.
Repairs the landlord will not make. Your remedy in commercial space depends almost entirely on lease language and, where the failure is severe enough to defeat the purpose of the tenancy, doctrines like constructive eviction and breach of the covenant of quiet enjoyment. Those are powerful arguments and dangerous ones. Withholding rent or walking out without building the record first is how a strong position becomes an eviction judgment.
Exclusivity and co-tenancy. The landlord leased to a competitor next door, or the anchor tenant that justified your rent went dark. Whether you have a remedy depends on what the lease says and on how quickly you object.
Lockouts and self-help. A California landlord cannot lock a commercial tenant out, cut power, or seize property to force payment, even if the lease appears to authorize it. The landlord must go to court. If yours has locked you out, that is an emergency and there may be exposure for the landlord.
Security deposits. On non-residential property, the landlord must return your deposit within thirty days after you give up possession, less amounts reasonably necessary for unpaid rent, tenant-caused damage, or cleaning. Bad faith retention can carry a statutory penalty on top of actual damages.
Assignment and sublease refusals. If your lease requires the landlord’s consent but does not spell out a standard for giving it, California law implies that consent may not be unreasonably withheld. If the lease flatly prohibits transfer, that prohibition can be enforceable. Which sentence your lease contains changes everything, which is why the exit clauses matter so much on day one.
Commercial Eviction Defense
A commercial unlawful detainer is fast and unforgiving. Once you are served with the lawsuit, you generally have ten court days to file a response. Miss it and the landlord can take your default, and you can lose possession of your business location without ever telling a judge your side.
Before the lawsuit comes the notice, and notices are where these cases are often won. A three-day notice to pay rent or quit has to comply with the statute and with the lease’s own notice provisions. In commercial cases the law lets a landlord state a reasonable estimate of the rent due when the exact figure depends on information the landlord holds, but that cuts both ways. If you tender what you reasonably estimate is owed within the notice period, and the trial shows that amount equaled or exceeded what was actually due, you can be the prevailing party. An amount within twenty percent of the true figure is presumed reasonable. This is a genuine strategic opportunity, and it is one that has to be executed correctly and on time.
Other defenses I look for: notices served on the wrong entity or the wrong person, notices that overstate rent or improperly demand late fees and other charges as rent, failure to follow a cure provision in the lease, waiver from a landlord who accepted rent after the notice, and for qualified commercial tenants, statutory violations that can be raised as an affirmative defense. Where a tenancy has already been forfeited, California courts also have the power to grant relief from forfeiture in appropriate cases, which is sometimes the difference between closing and staying open.
Most commercial eviction cases settle. What they settle for depends almost entirely on whether the landlord believes you will actually litigate.
If you also rent your home and are facing a residential case, my eviction defense page covers those rules, which are very different from these.
Getting Out: Exits, Buyouts, and Personal Guaranties
Sometimes the business does not work, or it outgrows the space, or a partner leaves. Walking away from a commercial lease without a plan is expensive, because you can remain on the hook for rent for the balance of the term, and if you signed a guaranty the landlord can come after you personally.
There is usually more room to negotiate than people expect. When a commercial landlord terminates after a breach, California law lets the tenant reduce the damages by proving what rental loss the landlord could reasonably have avoided, so a landlord who lets the space sit empty is not automatically entitled to every remaining month. There is an important exception where the lease permits you to assign or sublet subject to reasonable limits, and the landlord elects to keep the lease alive instead. Which track applies to you depends on your lease and on what the landlord does next. Landlords also frequently prefer a paying replacement tenant and a clean release to a judgment against a business with nothing left to collect, so a negotiated surrender, an assignment to a buyer of your business, or a sublease can end the exposure on terms you can live with.
If you are already being sued on a personal guaranty, the guaranty document itself deserves close reading. Scope, duration, whether it survived a lease amendment you never signed, whether the landlord’s conduct discharged it, and whether the damages claimed are properly calculated are all live issues.
Agricultural, Ranch, and Land Leases
Ventura County runs on ground that somebody else owns. Orchard and row crop leases, grazing agreements, equestrian and boarding facilities, packing and equipment yards, and long-term land leases all sit in a corner of commercial tenancy that most attorneys never touch.
They also carry issues an ordinary storefront lease never raises. Who holds and pays for the water, and what happens to your rights if the well fails or an allocation is cut. Who owns the trees, vines, and improvements you planted, and what you are owed for them at the end of the term. What happens to a standing crop if the tenancy ends mid-season. Who carries the risk of fire, flood, and regulatory change. How holdover and renewal work when your investment takes years to return.
I grew up working my family’s ranch in Rose Valley, and I still run it. I understand what it means when the lease term is shorter than the payback on what you put in the ground, and I do not need the basics explained to me.
Why Hire Me?
I am a solo practitioner, which means when you hire me, you get me. Not a paralegal. Not a junior associate. Me.
I built this practice on the tenant’s side of the table, and I bring that same posture to commercial work. I know how landlords, property managers, and their counsel operate, because I deal with them constantly.
I also understand small business, because I am one. I know what it costs to sign a five-year lease when you are not certain about year two, and I will tell you plainly when a fight is not worth what it costs to have it. Because I also handle work for property owners, I know how the other side prices risk, and that makes me better at getting you a deal rather than a lecture.
I have also volunteered with legal aid, because I believe access to justice should not depend on the size of your bank account. That belief shapes how I treat every client who walks through my door.
And I bring what I call ranch grit to every case. A work ethic and level of persistence that you will be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.
If you are in a dispute right now, start building the record today. Put your complaints and requests in writing, keep every invoice and operating expense statement the landlord sends, photograph conditions before they change, and do not sign an amendment, an estoppel certificate, or a settlement without having someone read it first. If you have been served with a notice or a lawsuit, note the date you were served and call immediately. The deadlines in these cases are counted in days, not weeks.
From my office in Ojai, I serve commercial tenants and small businesses across Ventura County, including Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, Santa Paula, Fillmore, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Moorpark, Port Hueneme, Oak View, and Meiners Oaks.
Your consultation is free. Commercial matters are handled under whatever fee arrangement actually fits the work, and I will explain it in plain language before you commit to anything. You can read how I approach fees on my fees and costs page.
Call or text: 805-295-4197 Email: alexmurad@ranchgritlaw.com
Disclaimer: This website is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Viewing this site or communicating with the Law Office of Alex Murad through this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. Licensed to practice law in California only.