The landlord's right to terminate the lease and take back the space upon a transfer request.
By Angel Campa, Founder · Updated March 2026
A recapture right allows the landlord to cancel the lease instead of approving an assignment or sublease. This effectively converts the tenant's transfer request into a lease termination -- which may or may not be what the tenant wants. If the tenant planned to profit from a sublease or maintain control of the space, recapture eliminates that opportunity. Recapture rights make tenants reluctant to even request consent, chilling transfer activity.
Found in the "Assignment and Subletting" section, usually as a separate paragraph describing the landlord's "right to recapture" or "right to terminate" upon receipt of a transfer request.
Lextract uses a combination of AWS Textract OCR and Claude AI to identify and extract the recapture right from your lease PDF. The AI searches for all pages of the document, then assigns a confidence score based on OCR quality and extraction certainty. Fields with lower confidence are flagged for human review.
Lextract automatically checks this field against its 15-rule red flag engine. Issues detected for recapture right:
Consent Required
Indicates if landlord approval is necessary for a transfer of the leasehold.
Consent Standard
The legal standard governing the landlord's right to refuse a transfer request.
Profit Sharing %
The portion of sublease profits payable to the landlord.
Permitted Transferees
Exemptions allowing corporate restructurings or M&A without landlord consent.
Continuing Liability
Indicates if the original tenant remains financially liable post-assignment.
When the tenant requests consent to assign or sublease, the landlord has the option to terminate the lease (for the proposed sublease space or the entire premises) instead of approving the transfer. The landlord then re-leases directly to the new tenant, capturing the full rent rather than the original tenant's lease rate.
Yes, though landlords strongly resist. Common compromises include: limiting recapture to assignments only (not subleases), requiring the landlord to exercise recapture within a short window (e.g., 15 days), or allowing recapture only if the sublease covers more than 50% of the premises.
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