Is this a fair offer to my tenant?

[Alex Martens]

Hi everyone. I’d love your input if you could….

I purchased my first property last November and it is an old, small cafe. I put a lot of work into the place to take care of some major issues and ended up getting a tenant in there to open up her own little diner/cafe. The lease started on March 1 and I am giving her until May 1 rent free. So I gave her 2 full months rent free so she could do any rehab she wanted to.

Unfortunately, the more she renovated, the more issues popped up and delayed her. So here we are approaching May 1 and we still don’t even have a CofO, so she realistically won’t even be able to open until at least June 1.

She wanted to replace the old heater with new Mitsubishi units (which I was fine with), and now she is saying that she doesn’t even have the money to install those at the moment. On top of this, when I had my plumber come do work, she wanted some extra bells and whistles done so I told her we’d do it but we’d have to split the cost since it was more than what was necessary. She agreed. She is now getting strapped with her money and is asking to negotiate the rent for May 1 ($2,000).

All of the renovations she did were purely cosmetic, and I took care of anything regarding structural integrity. I think it’s good for business that she is doing the renovations, but again, they were not necessary for her to open up.

So this is what I offered her.:

I told her I will not require May rent to be paid on the 1st. On top of this, I told her I will pay the cost to have the Mitsubishi units installed, and I will cover her portion of what was supposed to be paid to the plumber….all of these I am paying which is about $5,500 in value. However, I told her it will be a 24 month 0% loan that she needs to pay back. I thought this was pretty fair since she should do very well with her restaurant….and paying back 5500 bucks over 2 years shouldn’t be too hard. She didn’t seem thrilled with that offer and am waiting to hear a response on her final answer. What are your thoughts?

Thank you!