With a gross lease for commercial space, the renter pays the landlord a fixed monthly rent. It is then up to the landlord to pay the expenses of operating the building.

In many ways, renting commercial property with a gross lease is similar to renting a house or apartment.

Important to Know

• Many landlords already have their own leases. However, smaller landlords -- those who own only one or two buildings -- will be more likely to sign this lease form.
• Consider using a net lease (for an entire building or just part of one) which is often cheaper initially (because you pay the property taxes, insurance and maintenance instead of the landlord), but may become more expensive if operating costs rise. The shorter the lease period, the more inclined you should be to sign a net lease.

Operating system: Windows- and Macintosh-compatible. The computer you use to purchase an eForm must be the same computer you will download it to. (For example, don't purchase the eForm using your computer at work if you intend to download it later on to your home computer; instead, wait until you're on the computer you intend to download the eForm to and then make your purchase. After you've downloaded the file, you will be able to "transfer" it to another computer by copying it to external media or by email.) In addition, you will not be able to download this file if:

• cookies are disabled on your computer, or
• a firewall prevents you from downloading files from the Internet.

Software: Before you can use an eForm, additional software must be installed:
To expand the ZIP archive you download after making your purchase, you'll need:

• A decompression utility such as the following, both of which can be downloaded for free:

• 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org) (for Windows users).
• StuffIt Expander (http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/stuffit/expander.html) (for Macintosh). Please note: Many recently manufactured Macs have a native capability to decompress zip files. See your computer's user manual for verification of this and instructions for access.

To open, fill out and print an eForm, you need a word processor that "reads" RTF (rich text format) files:

• Windows XP & Vista both come with WordPad, an RTF-compatible word processor.
• Macintosh OS X comes with TextEdit, an RTF-compatible word processor; non-OS X users need Word 5.0 or greater, WordPerfect 2.1 or greater, or another RTF-compatible word processor.