What if my landlord wants to charge my buyer market rent instead of honouring my current lease rate?

On a straightforward assignment, the buyer generally steps into your existing lease as-is — including your current rent — and a landlord cannot simply impose market rent in place of it just because ownership of the business is changing. An assignment transfers the tenant's existing rights and obligations under the current lease; it isn't a new lease negotiation, unless your lease's consent clause specifically gives the landlord room to revisit rent as a condition of approving the assignment.

Where landlords do succeed in raising rent around a sale, it's usually connected to something else happening at the same time — a lease renewal falling due, an expired term being extended, or a change-of-control clause that the landlord is treating as an opportunity to negotiate fresh terms rather than a plain assignment.

If your landlord is pushing for market rent purely as a condition of consenting to an assignment on an otherwise unexpired lease, that's worth pushing back on rather than accepting as inevitable. A Treadstone business lawyer can assess whether your lease actually gives the landlord that leverage.