The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with an opportunity to examine the differences that exist between commercial and residential leases. Prepare a paper (not including title and reference pages) that addresses the following:

1. Select both a residential and commercial lease to examine. Describe the content of each lease and provide copies of each in the appendix of your paper.

2. Provide a detailed assessment of each of the leases in your paper. Include in your assessment of each lease at least three duties of both the landlord and tenant. How clear are the terms? In other words, is there anything a layperson (non-lawyer) would not understand?

3. Analyze four to six examples of differences that exist between the two leases and examine the significance of these differences.

You should be able to identify several key differences between the commercial and the residential leases. Some of these differences will be quite obvious such as the rental rate payment structure, the level of detail of each document, and the appendices that you may locate. For example, while residential rent is usually paid at a fixed amount on the first of the month, a commercial lease can vary greatly. Similarly, the security deposit for a residential is usually the equivalent of one month’s rent, however, depending on the commercial lease you find this will be quite different too. As a final example, the insurance requirement is also usually different and has a fair impact on the cost of the lease. Your examples will differ since all agreements are unique but these are some of the most blatant differences.