Tenant estoppel certificates, drafted from the lease file before any tenant is asked to sign.

Buyer's counsel or a lender sends its estoppel form, usually with a tenant list and a date it needs them back. For each tenant, someone on your team pulls the lease and its amendments, checks the abstract against the latest rent roll, fills in the form and decides which statements the tenant can fairly be asked to confirm. The form goes to the tenant, comes back signed or marked up, and every change is worked through before closing.

For the test, AI does that on copies of estoppels your team already prepared. It fills each form in draft, ties every answer to a lease section or a rent roll line, and lists each statement the file can't back up, along with any question the form asks that the lease never required. Default and claim lines stay blank, with every notice in the file listed beside them. We call it the sandbox. No tenant sees a draft, and nothing is signed.

The lease sets the clock and what silence means. Office leases filed as SEC exhibits show the range. A lease for a San Francisco waterfront building gives the tenant ten business days, lets the certificate cover the lease's status, any defaults and the rent due, and if the tenant still hasn't signed after twenty days, makes the landlord its attorney-in-fact to sign, with the contents deemed acknowledged. A Dublin, California office lease also allows ten business days, uses the form attached to the lease or whatever form a prospective lender or purchaser requires, and treats a missed deadline as the tenant's admission that the certificate's statements are true without exception. The draft records the response period, any deemed-admission language and the form the lease permits, beside the one the lender sent.

Lenders and buyers often ask for more than the lease promises. An industrial portfolio loan agreement on file with the SEC has the borrower use commercially reasonable efforts to deliver tenant estoppels when the lender asks, no more than once in any twelve months unless an event of default is continuing, confirming that each lease is in full force with no defaults, that no rent was paid more than a month ahead except as security, that no free rent or other concession is still owed and that the tenant claims no offset. A purchase agreement for a single-tenant medical building takes the certificate in the form the lease requires or the tenant's own current form, dated within thirty days before closing and delivered at least five business days ahead. The draft marks each question the lease doesn't oblige the tenant to answer, so your team decides whether to ask it anyway.

The deposit line can follow the building to its next owner. Texas's chapter on commercial tenancies makes a new owner liable for the security deposit from the day it takes title, keeps the former owner liable until the new owner hands the tenant a signed statement of the exact amount, and fixes that amount as the greater of the lease figure or the figure in an estoppel certificate prepared by the owner when the lease was signed, or by the new owner at the transfer. So the draft shows the deposit from the lease, each amendment and the records your team sends, and flags any difference among them. Your reviewer, usually the lease administrator or property manager who clears estoppels, will look hardest at the deposit, the paid-through date and anything near a default.

A signed certificate is hard to walk back. California's Evidence Code presumes the facts recited in a written instrument conclusively true between its parties and their successors in interest, except a recital of consideration. California's chapter on commercial lease transfers counts a sublease, an assignment or an encumbrance of part of the tenant's interest as a transfer, and a landlord's consent to one transfer doesn't reach the next unless the lease limits the restriction to the original tenant or the landlord says so in writing. Where a form asks whether the lease was assigned or sublet, the draft lists each consent letter in the file and each subtenant on the rent roll, then leaves the answer to your team. How either statute applies to a given certificate is a question for counsel.

A federal tenant answers with a letter, on its own clock. Under GSA's Statement of Lease clause, the contracting officer has 30 days after a joint written request from the lessor and a prospective lender or purchaser to issue a letter saying whether the lease is in full force, the date to which rent and other charges are paid in advance, and whether any notice of default has gone out, based only on a review of the lease file. The subordination clause gives the government twenty business days after a written demand to sign the papers that confirm it. After a sale, GSA's current lease template calls for notice to the government within five days and a novation agreement, with rent paid to the new owner only from the lease amendment that adds it. The draft flags every federal lease at the start and quotes the clause that governs its answer.

With your reviewer's yes, the job runs for about 30 days on the estoppel requests that arrive for the buildings you choose.

Each draft waits for your lease administrator or property manager to correct and approve it. Your team sends it to the tenant, takes the markups back and answers the lender or buyer. No second job starts in that month.