Last summer, I wrote about transitioning from real estate deals to navigating real estate disputes as a summer student. I watched a contested sale unfold in court and realized my background as an agent gave me a useful lens on real estate litigation. A year later, I’m back at McCague Borlack as an articling student, and that lens has sharpened in a direction I didn’t expect: leases.
As a realtor, a significant part of my work was in leasing residential and commercial properties. My job was to get a deal done. I found the right tenant, negotiated the terms, confirmed the deposit, and got signatures on the page. When the lease began, the file was closed. For a long time, I thought of this moment as the finish line.
Articling has taught me that the signature is where the lease begins, not where it ends.
At the firm, I have had opportunities to help on cases that reveal what happens after the parties have stopped paying attention to the lease agreement including issues of unpaid rent, repair obligations no one kept, a slip and fall in a common area, a tenant who leaves early or two insurers disputing whose policy should respond. In each one, the answer comes back to the clauses I once treated as standard. A line that took seconds to initial can decide who pays years later.
What surprised me most is how rarely the people involved remember what they agreed to. Landlords and tenants often think they know their obligations, but their memory of the deal and the document itself don’t always match. As an agent, I saw the realities behind these deals. Landlords are eager to fill a vacancy, and tenants are focused on the space and start date, not the fine print. In legal disputes, fine print is the first thing everyone reads.
That has changed how I think about both roles. When I review a lease on a file now, I read it the way I wish every party had read it at signing; spotting for any possible future disputes. Thinking back to my experience as a facilitator of these agreements, I see how litigation starts in those quiet, routine moments when a lease is signed, and everyone assumes nothing will go wrong.
Getting the lease signed was always the goal, but now I know it was the easy part.