Your Office Lease Is the Most Negotiable Contract You’ll Sign This Year

Pull up any office listing in LA right now and it looks completely normal. From asking rents to available suites and square footage, nothing stands out. Nothing suggests the landlord is under any pressure. 

They are.

The LA office vacancy rate landed over 25% in the first quarter of 2026. Vacancy measures the space landlords control and are actively marketing. Availability goes further. It includes sublease space that existing tenants are trying to offload, plus occupied space where the tenant isn't renewing and the lease is winding down. Layer all of that together and the number climbs above 30%. The Westside specifically has been over 20% for a year, and parts of Downtown are sitting at 50%. That's roughly three times higher than a healthy market.

What that means practically: landlords are competing for tenants in ways they haven’t been in years. The terms available to tenants who ask for them are substantially better than the terms available to those who don’t. 

Free Rent

As mentioned previously, asking rents look just as high as you would expect for LA. This is because landlords report those rates to lenders and appraisers. Dropping the asking rent creates valuation problems. Instead, they load deals with concessions that don't affect the headline number.

The most common is free rent. Over one month of free rent per year of a lease is not unusual. Here's why landlords agree to it: when a tenant moves out, the space doesn't lease overnight. It might sit empty for six months, a year, sometimes longer. Landlords are already factoring in that downtime when they underwrite a deal. Giving a new tenant free rent at the front of a lease isn't far off from the vacancy they were expecting anyway. The math for the tenant is simple: a tenant paying $30,000 a month who negotiates 6 months free rent keeps $180,000 in their business. One thing worth knowing: free rent typically gets added to the back of the lease term. A five-year deal with six months free becomes a 66-month lease. That number never appears on the listing but materially changes the economics of the deal.

This applies equally at renewal. Most tenants assume renewal is just a conversation about the new rate. It shouldn't be. A landlord with a vacancy problem would rather keep a known tenant than re-enter the market, and the math backs that up. If you leave, they're looking at months of vacancy, broker commissions, and tenant improvement costs for the next occupant. That's expensive. Five months of free rent on a five-year renewal is a reasonable ask right now, and most tenants never make it.

Tenant Improvement Allowance

A TI allowance is money the landlord contributes toward building out your space: walls, flooring, lighting, and finishes that stay in the building when you leave.

In a strong market, landlords had little reason to fund a tenant's renovation. Allowances were minimal, and a short-term lease often got nothing at all. The expectation was that if you wanted a finished space, you paid for it yourself.

That's changed. Landlords who used to require a five-year commitment before putting serious money into a buildout are now doing it for three-year deals. The quality of what's available, and what's negotiable, has moved meaningfully in the tenant's favor.

The number a landlord puts in front of you first is a starting point. In this market, there's almost always room to push.

Parking

Most landlords offer leases with parking rates set at "prevailing market rate," meaning the rate is not fixed. This gives the landlord the ability to increase parking costs by whatever they deem fair.

This is more relevant now than ever. With office availability at record highs, landlords are looking for ways to offset lost occupancy income, and parking is one of the primary levers they are pulling.

Most tenants don't push back on this because it doesn't look negotiable. It is. Fixed parking rates or capped annual increases are reasonable counters, and in this market landlords are more open to them than the lease language implies.