We wrote these reportsfrom the other side.

If you have worked in shopping center asset management, you have seen the file. Every quarter, someone assembles a co‑tenancy report: which centers are below their occupancy floors, which named tenants have gone dark, and which leases in the portfolio are therefore exposed. It exists so the owner is not surprised.

What was striking, doing that work, was how rarely the other side showed up. Tenants who were plainly entitled to alternative rent — in writing, in a lease their own company had negotiated — simply never served notice. Not because they had decided against it. Because nobody at that company knew the condition had occurred.

These are not unsophisticated businesses. They run thousands of stores with real estate teams and lease accounting departments and expensive software. The gap was never competence. It was that nobody was watching the centers, because watching the centers was not anybody’s job and no product did it.

Meanwhile the clock kept running. Co‑tenancy relief typically starts the month after notice is served, so every quarter of silence was money that could never be recovered — on both sides of a deal that had been fairly negotiated years earlier.

Breakpoint is that report, turned into a system, pointed at every center at once — and put in the hands of the tenants whose money was being left on the table.