When Alina Clark was ready to approach her office landlord with a conversation about renegotiating the rent, she knew that mentioning the economic havoc wrought by the pandemic wouldn't work. So the co-founder of CocoDoc, a software development company based in the Los Angeles area, tackled the problem in a different way.

"It's easier to get cuts on things like maintenance costs and utilities, instead of the base rent," she says. "We easily got a rent reduction by focusing on those, instead of the base rent." It also helped that she assured the landlord the company was going to stay for the long term. "The fact that we were willing to commit for five years was one of the major considerations when renegotiating the lease agreement," Clark says.

CocoDoc is one of millions of small businesses that make up the backbone of the commercial office sector.  They are not the Salesforces or JP Morgans of the corporate world by any means but their leases serve as an integral base for a building's occupancy. But until recently, by virtue of their small size, they have had little sway with landlords when it came to renegotiating or negotiating a lease.