What if my landlord wants a completely different rent structure as the price of approving my sale?

Whether the landlord can actually insist on this comes down to your lease's consent clause, and this is a more aggressive version of a common tactic. On a straightforward assignment, the buyer generally takes over your existing lease as-is, and a landlord using the consent request to push for a fundamentally different rent structure — moving from a fixed rent to a percentage-rent arrangement, for example, or changing how escalations work — is going well beyond simply assessing whether the buyer is a suitable tenant.

Some leases give landlords enough discretion over assignment conditions that this kind of demand is arguably within their rights; others limit the landlord's role narrowly enough that restructuring rent has little to do with approving an assignee and could support an argument that the condition is unreasonable, particularly where the lease incorporates a "not unreasonably withheld" standard.

Because a demand like this can meaningfully change what your buyer is agreeing to buy, it needs to be assessed against your specific lease before you or your buyer agree to anything. A Treadstone business lawyer can determine whether the landlord actually has this leverage.