Your Lease Has an Expiration Date — And So Does Your Right to Stay

A story broke this week out of St. Augustine that stopped me in my tracks — not because it surprised me, but because it reminded me of something I tell every one of my clients: your commercial lease is not just a formality. It is a legal document with deadlines that can change your life.

Original reporting by the St. Johns Citizen: https://sjcitizen.com/popular-st-augustine-restaurant-sues-to-stay-in-prime-spanish-street-space-amid-lease-dispute/

Here is what happened.

Treylor Park, a popular restaurant on Spanish Street in downtown St. Augustine, is now in court fighting to keep its doors open. The restaurant invested nearly $1 million to build out a space that was, by their own description, an empty shell with framing and dirt floors when they took possession. They opened in September 2023 after two years of construction — in part because the landlord required over $60,000 in soundproofing and exhaust changes along the way.

The lease began October 1, 2021 and expired March 31, 2026. The lease gave Treylor Park four options to renew for four-year terms each. But to exercise those options, they were required to give written notice at least 90 days before the lease expired. That made the renewal deadline December 31, 2025.

Treylor Park sent its renewal notice on April 24, 2026. That is nearly four months late.

The landlord, a New York-based entity, responded the same day: the lease is expired, you have no right to be here, and you are now a holdover tenant.

I am not here to tell you who is right or wrong. That is for a judge to decide, and both sides will have their say in St. Johns County Circuit Court. What I am here to tell you is this: this situation did not have to happen.

The Lease Deadline Nobody Talks About

When my clients sign a lease, we celebrate. And we should. Getting the keys is a big deal. But the moment the ink dries, a clock starts ticking — and most tenants do not know it.

Renewal option deadlines are buried deep in commercial leases. They are not on your front door. They are not in your POS system. They are not on a sticky note in your office. They are on page 11 of a document you signed years ago, and they are easy to forget.

Here is what I started doing when I was a residential agent: I would send my buyer clients a calendar reminder to apply for their Homestead tax exemption. It sounds small, but that one reminder saved people real money. This Treylor Park situation is making me realize I need to do the same thing for every commercial tenant I represent — a calendar reminder, sent the day the lease is signed, for every option exercise deadline in the lease.

If you are a tenant and your agent did not send you that reminder, send it to yourself right now. Go find your lease, find the renewal option section, calculate the deadline, and put it on your calendar today.

The Renovation Question

Here is the part of this story that is hardest to sit with.

Treylor Park put $1 million into that space. They did not inherit a turnkey restaurant. They built one from scratch. And now, if they are forced to leave, every dollar of that improvement stays with the building — with the landlord.

That is not illegal. That is actually how most commercial leases work. Tenant improvements become the property of the landlord at lease termination unless the lease says otherwise. It is one of the most important things to negotiate before you sign.

It also raises questions that only the people in that room can answer. What did the market look like in 2021 when this lease was signed, and what does it look like today on one of St. Augustine's most trafficked streets? How have NNN expenses shifted over five years? These are not accusations — they are the kinds of dynamics that play out in commercial real estate every single day, on both sides of the table, and they are exactly why the details of a lease matter so much more than most tenants realize when they are signing.

What I Learned From My Own Deal

Here is a story that proves reading your lease — really reading it — can save you.

I had a client whose landlord sent the lease directly to him through DocuSign. No copy to me. No copy to the landlord's own broker. Just straight to my client, ready to sign.

Here is the thing: my client read it. Every page. And he caught a clause that gave the landlord the right to terminate the lease for any reason with just 60 days notice. He flagged it to me and that is when we also realized none of the brokers had been given a copy of the lease at all.

We were all like... excuse me, WHAT?

Once I saw the full document, we went to work. That termination clause came out. Several other problematic terms came out with it. My client could have clicked through DocuSign in five minutes and signed away his stability without ever knowing. Instead he slowed down, read every word, and protected himself.

That is exactly why I do what I do — and exactly why I tell every client: do not let anyone rush you to a signature.

What You Should Do Today

1. Pull out your lease and find your renewal option deadline. Put it on your calendar with a reminder 120 days out. Do it today.

2. Before you spend significant money on tenant improvements, negotiate what happens to those improvements at the end of the lease. You may be entitled to compensation or the right to remove them — but only if the lease says so.

3. Work with a commercial real estate broker who reads leases. Not just skims them. Reads them. Every clause has a purpose, and some of those purposes are not in your favor.

4. And then do this yourself too. Print the lease out. Read it out loud, slowly, every page. Run it through an AI tool like ChatGPT and ask it to flag anything unusual or one-sided. And please — do not sign electronically until you have received the full document as an attachment and reviewed it first. When you sign electronically inside a platform, it jumps from signature field to signature field. You can skip 40 pages without ever reading a word. I insist on this with every client. Most importantly — and I know most people skip this step — have a real estate attorney review it. The LOI you negotiated was a page or two. The lease the landlord's attorney produced is 45 pages. They had a lawyer write it. You deserve one to read it.

I am rooting for Treylor Park. I have never been, but I hope to go soon — assuming the judge agrees that a four-month-late notice, after a $1 million buildout and two and a half years of operation, deserves a second look.

And to every commercial tenant reading this: your lease has an expiration date. Know it. Track it. Protect it.

---

Melesia Ziller is the founder of Clearpath Commercial, a commercial real estate brokerage based in Jacksonville, FL. She works with tenants, landlords, buyers and sellers across Northeast Florida and beyond.

Melesia@clearpathcommercialbroker.com | 904-903-8755 | clearpathcommercialbroker.com