Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: NY Commercial Landlords' Duty To Mitigate

The fluidity of New York's legal landscape continues to accelerate in the wake of the pandemic. Proposed legislation in New York may disrupt long-established law that commercial landlords do not have a duty to mitigate their damages when a tenant vacates its premises in violation of the terms of its lease. 

When a tenant vacates its premises in violation of its lease, a landlord suffers damages such as lost rents through the remainder of the lease term and expenses of re-letting. The extent of those damages depends on the amount of effort that a landlord expends in finding a new tenant. If a landlord is slow to take steps to re-let the premises, or "mitigate its damages," it takes longer to find a new tenant. The longer it takes to find a new tenant, the higher the damages accrue. If a landlord takes no mitigation action at all, its damages pile up throughout the remainder of the lease term.