What is a personal guarantee in a commercial lease?

A personal guarantee makes you personally responsible for the lease even though your business is the tenant. If the business closes, the landlord can still pursue your personal assets. Guarantees are often negotiable — capped, limited in time, or converted to a security deposit — but only if you catch the language before you sign.

Austin Commercial Lease Lawyer | Flat-Fee Tenant-Side Review

Why this matters

A commercial lease is a five-year decision you make in an afternoon.

The landlord's lawyer drafted it to protect the landlord. The terms that look like standard boilerplate — the personal guarantee, the CAM reconciliation, the assignment and default clauses — are the ones that decide what happens if the business slows, moves, or closes. Someone who has spent twenty years litigating those clauses in court reads them for what they will actually do to you, not for what they say.

The guarantee that follows you home

A personal guarantee puts your own assets on the hook if the business can't pay. It's often negotiable — capped, time-limited, or burned off over the term — but only if it's caught before you sign.

The CAM clause that isn't a fixed number

"Triple net" and CAM reconciliation language can hand the landlord an open-ended bill for taxes, insurance, and common-area costs. We tell you what you're really agreeing to pay beyond the base rent.

What happens when you need out

Assignment, sublease, and default terms decide whether you can leave, sell, or survive a missed payment. These are negotiable at signing and nearly impossible to fix afterward.

The number, upfront

Flat-fee commercial lease review.

Every lease is scoped on a free 20-minute call and quoted as a flat number before any work begins. If the lease is longer or more complex than the starting price covers, you'll know exactly what it costs — before, not after.

Tenant-side review

Commercial Lease Review

from $950

The landlord handed you a lease drafted by their lawyer. Before you sign it — and before you sign the personal guarantee — a litigator reads it and tells you what's actually in there.

Full redline of the lease
Market-term comparison — which terms are standard for Austin and which are aggressive
Negotiation memo — the specific points to push back on, in priority order
A 30-minute call to walk through it
Three-business-day turnaround

On a deadline? Tell us on the call — if a landlord is pushing you to sign this week, we'll tell you what's possible.

Book a free 20-minute call →

How it works

Four steps, no meter running.

STEP 1

Free 20-minute call

You tell us what the space is and what the deal looks like. We tell you the flat fee and the turnaround, on the call.

STEP 2

Send the lease

You send the lease and any letter of intent or landlord correspondence. The clock starts when we have what we need — three business days, standard.

STEP 3

Redline & negotiation memo

You get the marked-up lease, a comparison against market terms, and a memo: what's risky, what to negotiate, and what it means if you don't.

STEP 4

The walk-through call

We get on the phone and go through it, so you walk into the negotiation knowing which points matter and which you can trade.

Who you'll work with

The person who reads your lease is the person who has litigated them.

Patrick Hotze

Founder & Attorney, Ridgeline Legal, PLLC

Before founding Ridgeline, Patrick spent two decades in complex litigation, co-founding a practice that recovered more than $200 million for clients across mass tort, pharmaceutical liability, and industrial accident matters. Past results don't guarantee future outcomes — but twenty years of litigating disputes teaches you exactly where a commercial lease breaks and how the other side thinks.

Every lease is reviewed by Patrick personally. Modern tools handle the first pass on research and market-term comparison, which is why the work moves fast — but the judgment about what actually matters in your deal is his, on every matter.

Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Licensed in Texas and Washington, D.C.

Questions

Straight answers, before you call.

How much does it cost to have a lawyer review a commercial lease in Austin?+

Commercial lease review is a flat fee from $950. That covers a full redline of the lease, a comparison against current Austin market terms, and a memo of the specific points to negotiate — plus a call to walk through it. The price is quoted before any work begins, not after.

What does the review include?+

A full redline of the lease, a market-term comparison so you know which terms are standard and which are aggressive, a plain-English memo of the points worth negotiating in priority order, and a 30-minute call to walk through all of it. Turnaround is three business days from when we have the document.

Can a personal guarantee really be negotiated?+

Often, yes. A personal guarantee makes you personally responsible for the lease even though your business is the tenant — if the business closes, the landlord can pursue your personal assets. Guarantees can frequently be capped, limited in time, or burned off as you prove out the tenancy. But that only happens if the language is caught and raised before you sign.

How fast can you review a lease?+

Standard turnaround is three business days from when we have the lease and the context. If you're up against a signing deadline, tell us on the call and we'll tell you what's possible.

Do you represent tenants or landlords?+

This service is built for the tenant — the business signing space it didn't draft. The landlord's lawyer wrote the lease to protect the landlord; our job is to read it for you before you sign. We serve Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties from our office in West Lake Hills, and most lease work is handled remotely.

Before you sign the lease,
let a litigator read it.