Additional Rent on a Calgary Warehouse Lease

The components

Additional rent on a Calgary industrial building is normally built from:

• Property tax. Usually the single largest line. Driven by The City's assessed value and the annual non-residential rate. How Calgary assessment works →
• Building insurance. The landlord's policy on the structure, not your contents or liability cover.
• Common area maintenance (CAM). Snow and ice, sweeping, landscaping, parking and yard repair, exterior lighting, common utilities, security, waste.
• Repairs and maintenance. Roof, exterior, HVAC servicing on common systems, dock equipment where common.
• Management fee. Often a percentage of gross or of the other operating costs. Always ask which, and what percentage.
• Structural or capital reserve, where the lease allows it. This is worth reading closely — the difference between a repair and a capital replacement determines who pays.

Utilities to your own premises — power, gas, water where separately metered — normally sit outside additional rent and are billed to you directly.

The clauses that decide the money

Capital vs. repair

The most valuable clause in the lease for a warehouse tenant. If the landlord can pass through a full roof replacement or a parking lot reconstruction as an operating cost, your additional rent can jump sharply in a single year. Well-drafted tenant positions either exclude capital items, or require them to be amortised over their useful life with only the annual amortised portion recovered, at a stated interest rate.

Proportionate share

Check the denominator. Is your share calculated on leasable area of the building, of the park, or of an area that includes vacant space? Who pays the operating cost attributable to vacancy matters in a multi-tenant building.

Caps and exclusions

Caps on controllable operating costs (everything except tax, insurance and utilities) are negotiable and worth asking for. So are explicit exclusions: leasing commissions, marketing, the landlord's own financing costs, work to other tenants' premises, costs recovered under warranty or insurance.

Audit rights

A right to review the operating cost statement, within a stated window, with a mechanism for correcting overcharges. Without it you are accepting the annual reconciliation on trust.

What to ask for before you sign

1. The current year's additional rent estimate, broken into components.
2. The actual reconciled figures for the last three years, in the same breakdown.
3. Whether any capital work is planned or under way — roof, parking, dock levellers, HVAC replacement.
4. The building's assessed value history. That is public, and it is on this site for every Calgary industrial address.
5. How your proportionate share is calculated, and on what denominator.

Why the building's age matters here

Older buildings carry more maintenance risk in additional rent — roofs, slabs, HVAC and parking all age. Calgary's industrial stock has a median construction year of 2000s concentration, with 2,232 accounts on buildings recorded as built before 1980 and 1,047 built since 2010. A low net rate on a 1970s building with an original roof is not automatically the cheaper deal. Compare Calgary warehouses by construction era →

No rates published hereNeither this page nor any dataset behind this site publishes an additional rent figure, an operating cost rate, or a net rent for any Calgary building. Those come from the landlord's statements and direct market research.