09/17/2026
Your lease ends December 31. The new building says "probably the 28th."
Probably is the most expensive word in a relocation.
Tenant improvement schedules slip, and they slip for reasons nobody at your company controls, a permit, a failed inspection, switchgear that turned out to be twelve weeks instead of six. Meanwhile your old lease has a hard date on it, and the date does not care.
You can't control a construction schedule. You can control whether a two-week slip is a crisis or a line item you already priced.
Find out what "ready" legally means. Certificate of occupancy, substantial completion, and "you can start bringing furniture in" are three different milestones on three different dates. Get the definition in writing, and ask your landlord which one they're actually promising.
Track the long-lead items yourself. Don't take the weekly construction call as your only source. Switchgear, rooftop HVAC units, millwork, glass, security hardware, and the ISP install are the items that slip, ask for the actual purchase order dates, not a status color.
Walk the space twice. Once around 80% complete, once at substantial completion. The first walk is when a problem is still cheap to fix and still someone else's cost. The punch list you discover on move weekend is yours.
Price the gap now, not later. If the old lease ends before the new space is reliably ready, you need one of three things already arranged: holdover on the existing lease, short-term storage with a staged delivery, or a phased move into a partial footprint. All three take lead time. None of them can be set up in the last ten days.
Know your holdover number before you need it. Commercial leases commonly price holdover well above base rent, often 150% or more, sometimes with no partial months.
Read your own clause. That number is what determines which of the three options above is actually cheapest, and most people find it out during the week they have no leverage.
Agree when the move date becomes firm. Ask your mover, in advance, at what point the date locks and what moving it costs before then. A mover who can't answer that clearly is a risk in a schedule that's already uncertain.
A relocation with a construction date in it isn't one plan. It's a plan plus a contingency, and the contingency is the part that gets skipped.
If your new space is under construction and your old lease has a hard date on it, call Johnson Commercial Solutions today at 1-800-BUY-MOVE. The gap between those two dates is the whole plan, and it's far cheaper to build early.
