For Dental Practice Owners
Search for a dental real estate broker in Michigan and you’ll mostly find people who sell practices. This page is about the other profession that shares the name — finding, negotiating, and buying the space itself.
Two Professions, One Name
Practice-transition brokers value and sell dental practices — the patient base, the goodwill, the business. Space representation is a different discipline: finding the right building, negotiating the lease or purchase, and protecting the practice through build-out and delivery. Both get called “dental real estate,” and search engines routinely serve one when a dentist needs the other.
Skylark does the space side. Selling your dental practice and own the building? Your practice-transition broker handles the business transaction. Skylark can help with the real estate valuation and property sale, working alongside your transition team. If you’re opening, renewing, relocating, expanding, or buying the building — that’s the work this page is about. The two disciplines also meet regularly: a transition that includes a relocation, or a purchase where the real estate and the practice change hands together, needs both kinds of judgment at the table.
Why Dental Space Is Different
One of the first things we look at in a dental site is whether the building actually wants to become a dental office. A space can look perfect on a tour and become a very different deal once we start talking about plumbing, power, HVAC, and the landlord’s work letter. Four places that shows up:
Operatory supply, vacuum, and drainage lines get set before the floor does. A layout decision made casually in week two becomes concrete work in year six. Space that fights your operatory plan is expensive forever, which is why the floor plan review belongs in the letter of intent stage, not after signing.
Dental build-outs routinely cost multiples of what a standard office improvement allowance assumes. The gap between the landlord’s tenant-improvement number and the true cost of a clinical build is where lease term, rent structure, and allowance get traded against each other — and where an unrepresented tenant quietly funds the difference.
Equipment lead times, inspections, licensure, and patient scheduling all ride on the delivery date. A dental lease needs delivery conditions, remedies, and outs written for a practice that cannot simply “work from home” if the space is late.
Retail-visible space costs more than professional-building space. Whether that premium pays depends on how your practice acquires patients: a referral-driven specialist and a new-patient-driven general practice should not be shopping the same buildings.
Negotiating the Lease
Our team has represented more than 150 dental transactions, more than 80 of them practice startups, across general dentistry, orthodontics, pediatric dentistry, endodontics, oral surgery, periodontics, and prosthodontics. These are the terms that most often decide whether a dental lease works for the practice:
Have the space drawn for your operatories, sterilization, lab, and imaging before the deal terms are agreed. The drawing tells you how many chairs actually fit, where the plumbing has to run, and how much concrete has to be cut. Those facts change what the space is worth to you, and they are your strongest leverage while the landlord still wants the deal.
The build-out allowance is the money the landlord contributes to build your space. A dental build-out typically costs several times what a standard office allowance covers, so get a contractor estimate early. Then trade on the whole package: allowance, rent, length of lease, and free rent during construction can all move against each other.
An exclusive is a clause that stops the landlord from leasing another space in the same center or building to a competing dental practice, or to your specialty. It is one of the most valuable terms a dental tenant can secure, and the easiest to forget.
Tie the rent start date to the landlord delivering the space and to your permits, and spell out what happens if delivery runs late. Equipment, staff, and patients are scheduled around that date.
If you sell the practice one day, the buyer will need to take over the lease. Make sure the lease allows a transfer to a buyer of the practice without terms that can stall the sale. Many practice sales slow down at exactly this clause.
Renewal options give you the right to stay at defined terms after the first term ends, which protects the investment you made in the build-out. Landlords often ask a new practice owner to guarantee the lease personally; ask for a cap on that guarantee, or for it to fall away after a period of on-time rent.
Skylark negotiates the real estate terms; your attorney reviews the lease itself. On a dental lease, both conversations should start before the letter of intent is signed.
The Lifecycle
Opening or expanding is where site selection and build-out economics dominate. A lease renewal is quieter but often higher-leverage — one mistake we see dentists make is treating it as paperwork, when the landlord has priced the cost of moving a dental practice into the renewal number and only preparation moves it back. A relocation is both at once. And a building purchase turns the rent question into an ownership question, with its own diligence.
Start with the practice you expect to run through the next term. Will the existing space still work, or will equipment, staffing or patient demand change what you need? Then compare staying with realistic alternatives, including the cost and disruption of moving a dental office. The renewal decision belongs in that comparison. Skylark helps you evaluate the space and negotiate the real estate terms, with your attorney reviewing the legal documents.
Where to put the practice is its own decision, and it deserves better than intuition. The sequence — region, then community, then site, then space — is our guide to choosing a dental practice location in Michigan, and our Metro Detroit corridor map is how Skylark reads the geography. Physicians and cross-specialty groups can use our Michigan medical real estate guide.
Dentists considering a startup can read our 2026 Dental Startup Roadshow recap: an afternoon inside two Metro Detroit startups with the dentists who built them.
“With their expertise, I was able to feel confident in my lease negotiations and know that I was getting a fair deal. As a dentist, knowing that they are experts in this type of realty, I never had to worry.”
Start before the letter of intent: test-fit the floor plan for your operatories, get a contractor estimate for the build-out, and use those numbers to negotiate the build-out allowance, rent, lease length, and free rent together. Then secure the terms that matter most to a dental practice: an exclusive against competing dental tenants, a rent start tied to delivery of the space, the right to transfer the lease to a buyer of the practice, renewal options, and limits on any personal guarantee. Skylark negotiates the real estate terms; your attorney reviews the lease.
Dental space depends on plumbing, vacuum, and power that are set into the floor, and a dental build-out typically costs several times a standard office improvement. That makes the floor plan, the build-out allowance, the delivery date, and the right to transfer the lease to a future buyer far more important than in a typical office lease.
A practice broker values and sells the dental practice itself: the patients, the goodwill, the business. A dental real estate broker represents the dentist on the space: finding the building, negotiating the lease or purchase, and protecting the practice through build-out. Skylark does the space side, and when an owner sells the practice and owns the building, Skylark can handle the real estate valuation and property sale alongside the transition team.
In most leases and purchases, the landlord or seller pays our fee through the commission already built into the deal.
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