If you’re on the hunt to rent meeting space for your church, you need to know how to review a worship facility lease. Here’s how:
Lease contracts come in all shapes and sizes. Don’t just hope that they’ve included all the important details. Likewise, don’t just hope that they didn’t put any onerous clauses in there that will hurt you or the church.
The worst lease drafts I’ve seen over the years are ones that were obviously adapted from for-profit, commercial use. Some things are different with a nonprofit (like not having business owners). If they just copy everything over 1:1, you’ll get a bit of apples and oranges going on.
Read the Whole Thing
It’s a legal contract and you’re responsible for all of it if you sign in. It may be laborious, but read through the whole thing once.
Note the Particulars
Now go back and make sure you understand the particulars. Use my FREE worship facility lease checklist to make sure they’ve included all the important stuff and left out the bad stuff. You can check each item off, or better, copy the particulars over to the worksheet portion to make sure you’ve got everything straight.
A tool like this will help reveal blind spots and help you avoid surprises in the lease.
Get Counsel
Even with the free worship facility lease checklist, you should consider having a real estate professional and/or lawyer review the lease. At least work your local network and your network of supporters to see if there’s a Kingdom-minded professional that might be able to look at your lease pro bono.
If you’re nervous about not knowing how to review a worship facility lease, don’t be. There are tools to help and people that want to help, too. Happy hunting!
