Your NNN Rent Is Only Half the Bill — Here's Where DFW Industrial Tenants Quietly Overpay

A client of mine leased a 60,000 square foot distribution building in the Stemmons corridor a few years back and was thrilled with the base rent he'd negotiated. Then the first annual CAM reconciliation landed in his inbox the following March, almost eleven percent higher than what his broker had estimated during lease-up. Nothing about it was illegal or even unusual. It's just what happens when a tenant signs a triple net lease without pinning down how operating expenses actually get calculated, capped, and passed through.

Base rent gets all the attention in a DFW industrial deal, and it's easy to see why. Matthews put DFW industrial asking rent at a record $10.36 per square foot in Q3 2026, up 1.8% year over year, and CBRE has vacancy at 7.8%, down from 8.2% the quarter before. Tenants fixate on that headline number the way people fixate on a truck's sticker price. But in a NNN lease, base rent is only half of what you actually pay. The rest lives in the operating expense section, and it's the part most people skim.

Start with property taxes, usually the biggest piece of the pass-through and the one most tenants can't negotiate away entirely. Taxes reset when a building sells or gets reappraised, and DFW industrial values haven't been heading down. If your lease passes through 100% of a reassessment with no cap, you're underwriting your landlord's next trade. Ask what the building is assessed at today and what a recent sale price would imply for the next reassessment cycle. You usually can't cap taxes outright, but you can at least walk in knowing what's coming.

Read the definition of operating expenses like it was written by your opponent, because in most cases it was. The management fee should be capped as a percentage of base rent, not calculated against total operating expenses including the pass-throughs, which inflates the number in ways that have nothing to do with how much work actually went into managing the property. Ask which base the fee is calculated against before you sign, not after the first bill arrives. Capital repairs, a new roof or a parking lot reconstruction, shouldn't land on you in a single year either. Amortize them over their useful life, and only the portion that falls inside your actual lease term. I've seen a tenant billed for an entire new roof on a five-year deal. It doesn't have to work that way.

Gross-up provisions deserve attention even in a tight market. If a building in a multi-tenant park isn't fully occupied, expenses should be grossed up to around 95% occupancy so you're not subsidizing empty suites or paying a disproportionate share of fixed costs. At 7.8% vacancy that matters less for the metro overall, but plenty of individual buildings still sit lumpy, and the clause is worth having regardless.

Get real audit rights, not a polite clause that says you may request records. You want an actual right to review the landlord's supporting documentation within a set window, 60 to 120 days after the annual statement is a common range, with the landlord covering the audit cost if the overcharge clears a threshold like 3%. Some leases only allow your own internal review; better ones let a third-party audit firm in, sometimes on a contingency basis where the firm only gets paid if it finds an overcharge. Landlords behave better when they know someone might actually look.

None of this is about assuming landlords are trying to take advantage of tenants. Most operating expense disputes come from ambiguity, a lease that never clearly defined how a cost gets allocated or capped, rather than bad faith. A clearly drafted clause with a reasonable expense cap, defined audit rights, and clean capital-versus-operating language protects the landlord from constant disputes just as much as it protects you from a surprise bill.

My honest read: a landlord with a signed LOI and a tenant who only argues about rent will give up a few cents on base rate and leave the operating expense language exactly as written. Flip that. Spend your leverage on the expense clause and the tax cap conversation instead, because those are the dollars that keep compounding for the full term. Before you sign anywhere in DFW right now, ask your broker to model total occupancy cost across the full lease, not just the rent schedule. If nobody's done that math, you're only negotiating half the deal.