There are many issues which landlords and tenants must negotiate in commercial leasing transactions. In the first two parts of this article, which deals with the tax treatment of important lease terms, we discussed lease inducement payments and tenant construction allowances. In this part, and the next, we will briefly discuss the importance of lease termination payments.

Generally, I.R.C. § 263 disallows a current deduction for amounts chargeable to capital account. The applicable Tax Regulations provide that a taxpayer must capitalize amounts paid to another party to terminate a lease of real property between the taxpayer-lessor and the lessee. However, these regulations fail to discuss whether the payment is a nondeductible capital expenditure or whether it is amortizable and, if so, for what period is it capitalized into the cost of the building?