When do you have to give notice to exercise an office lease renewal option?

Most office lease renewal options require written notice 9 to 15 months before the lease expires, and the exact window is spelled out in your option clause. Miss the window, even by a day, and the option is void... the landlord owes you nothing. Termination options typically require 9 to 12 months of notice plus a fee, and a right of first refusal can demand a response within 10 to 30 days of the landlord's notice. With Denver metro office vacancy at roughly 27% on the major brokerages' Q2 2026 read (18.5% on the broader all-stock basis), a lapsed renewal option means walking into a tenant-favorable market without the floor you already paid for.

You negotiated hard for the options in your lease. The renewal at a set percentage of fair market rent. The one-time termination right. The first crack at the suite next door. Your attorney billed for the language, your broker fought for the terms, and then everyone went back to running the business.

Here's the problem. Every one of those rights expires on a calendar date, and most tenants discover the exercise window after it closes. Not because anyone was careless in the moment... because nobody owned the calendar. I've seen it happen to companies with sharp CFOs and full legal departments. The lease sits in a PDF, the date passes quietly, and a right you paid for evaporates.

Four options, four separate clocks

Each option type in a commercial lease runs on its own notice mechanics. Know which ones you have and what each clock looks like.

Renewal options. The right to extend your lease, usually at fair market rent or a preset rate. Typical notice windows run 9 to 15 months before expiration, and I've seen them as long as 18. The clause almost always requires written notice, often by certified mail to a specific address, and most include "time is of the essence" language. That phrase means exactly what it says. Courts enforce these deadlines literally.

Termination options. A one-time right to walk away early, usually at a fixed point like the end of year five or seven. Notice typically runs 9 to 12 months ahead of the termination date, paired with a fee that covers the landlord's unamortized tenant improvement dollars and commissions, sometimes plus a few months of rent.

Expansion options. The right to take defined additional space at a defined time. These carry a fixed exercise window tied to a date or to when the space becomes available, and the window is often shorter than a renewal window.

Rights of first refusal and first offer. These work differently. The clock starts when the landlord sends you notice that another tenant wants the space, and you often have just 10 to 30 days to respond. You can't calendar the trigger. You can only build the discipline to respond fast, which means knowing in advance whether you'd take the space and at what economics.

Four rights, four clocks, and only one of them rings on a schedule you control.

What a missed window actually costs

The cost depends on which right lapsed, but none of them are cheap.

A missed termination option traps you. That one-time exit at year five was your insurance policy against a headcount miss or a downturn. Let the notice date pass and you're committed through the back half of the term no matter what the business does. If your footprint is now twice what you need, your remaining moves are a sublease at a discount... built-out sublease space in Denver trades at roughly 30% below direct asking rents (SVN | Denver Commercial / CoStar, Q2 2026)... or riding out the term at full freight.

A missed renewal option leaves you negotiating with no floor. This is the one that stings most right now, because the Denver market would have handed you leverage anyway. Metro vacancy sits near cycle highs at roughly 27% (major brokerage reports, Q2 2026) and landlords are competing with concessions near one month of free rent per year of term plus elevated TI allowances. A live renewal option gives you the best of both worlds: the option rate is your floor, and the open market is your upside. You run both numbers and take the better deal. That's the same math I walk through in how landlord vacancy shapes your Denver renewal leverage.

Lapse the option and the floor disappears. Now your only counter is a credible threat to move, which means touring space, pricing a relocation, and running the relocate versus renew analysis under time pressure instead of on your schedule. The landlord knows your expiration date better than you do, and every month closer to it, your alternatives get thinner. Run out of runway entirely and you're into holdover, where staying past expiration in Denver gets expensive fast... holdover clauses typically bill 150% to 200% of your last rent.

And the market floor isn't uniform. If you're in Cherry Creek, where Class A vacancy is 1.8% and Class A asking rents run $68.32 per square foot (CBRE, Q2 2026), there is no soft market to catch you. A lapsed option there means negotiating landlord-favorable terms with no fallback at all.

A missed expansion option or ROFR blocks growth. The suite next door goes to another tenant on a seven-year term, and your expansion plan just became a relocation plan. Contiguous space is the hardest thing to replace, and quality options are thinning... only about 708,000 square feet is under construction metro-wide, roughly 73% of it concentrated in Cherry Creek, and demolitions now outpace deliveries (CBRE, Q2 2026).

Why nobody tracks these dates, and the fix

The failure mode is almost always the same. The person who negotiated the lease left the company three years ago. The lease lives in a PDF attached to an email nobody can find. The CFO tracks rent expense in the budget, not option mechanics in the document. And the notice requirements are precise enough... written notice, certified mail, a specific addressee at a specific address... that even a tenant who remembers the date can fumble the delivery.

Landlords, meanwhile, track every one of these dates. Their asset management software flags your notice window the day it opens and the day it closes. The information asymmetry isn't malice. It's just that one side treats the lease as its core business and the other side treats it as a filing.

The fix is boring and it works: abstract the lease, then calendar every date.

A lease abstract is a two-to-three page summary of the document's critical terms. For option tracking, it needs to capture, at minimum:

• Every option: renewal, termination, expansion, ROFR, ROFO
• The exact exercise window for each: open date and close date
• The notice mechanics: written form, delivery method, addressee, address
• The economics attached: option rent formula, termination fee calculation, expansion space and terms
• Lease expiration, and any co-terms with amendments or storage or parking agreements

Then put the dates where they can't hide. Calendar each notice window with reminders at 18, 15, and 12 months out, assign a named owner (not a department... a person), and put a backup owner on the same invites so a departure doesn't take the calendar with it. When the first reminder fires, that's your cue to start the real decision work: market survey, headcount forecast, and the renew-or-relocate analysis, with 18 to 24 months of runway instead of six.

Thirty minutes of abstraction protects rights you may have paid six figures to negotiate. I don't know a better return on effort anywhere in corporate real estate.

Frequently asked questions

How far in advance do I have to exercise a commercial lease renewal option?

Typically 9 to 15 months before lease expiration, though windows range from 6 to 18 months depending on the lease. The controlling answer is always your option clause, which states the exact open and close dates and the required notice method. Most clauses include "time is of the essence" language, which means the deadline is enforced literally.

What happens if I miss my lease renewal option deadline?

The option is void and you negotiate a renewal from scratch, with no contractual floor on rent or terms. In Denver's roughly 27% vacancy market (major brokerage reports, Q2 2026) you may still land a competitive deal, but the landlord now knows you have no locked-in alternative and your expiration clock is running. In tight submarkets like Cherry Creek at 1.8% Class A vacancy, a lapsed option can cost far more.

Can a landlord waive a missed option notice deadline?

A landlord can choose to honor a late notice, and some will if the relationship is good and the space is hard to backfill. But nothing requires them to, and courts generally enforce option deadlines strictly. Treat any waiver as a favor you can't count on, and have counsel review before you rely on one.

What is a lease abstract and who should prepare one?

A lease abstract is a short summary, usually two to three pages, of a lease's critical dates, notice requirements, and economic terms. Your tenant rep broker, real estate counsel, or an internal lease administrator can prepare one. Whoever does it, the output should feed a shared calendar with reminders starting at least 18 months before each notice window closes.

Your lease options are leverage you already paid for. They just come with expiration dates, and the landlord is the only party tracking them unless you change that. Abstract the lease, calendar the dates, name an owner... and every renewal conversation starts from a position of strength instead of a scramble.

If you're not certain when your renewal or termination notice windows open and close, fix that this week. Send me your lease and I'll abstract it and map every critical date... renewal windows, termination rights, expansion rights, and the exact notice mechanics for each... free, no strings attached. Schedule a conversation.

About Brian McCririe
Brian McCririe is Executive Managing Director of SVN | Denver Commercial and National Council Chair for Occupier Services across the SVN network. After 25 years representing tenants and investors across global markets, he now focuses on the Denver Metro area helping companies navigate leases, acquisitions, and the gap between what landlords offer and what occupiers deserve. He leads one of the metro's top tenant rep practices and writes about the deals, decisions, and market shifts that matter to corporate real estate leaders.