Welcome back to Walk Away Money. Desmond Whitfield here. This week we have a cafe owner in Austin who got a letter from her landlord saying the rent is going up thirty percent at renewal. She called me and the first thing she said was, I have no leverage, he owns the building. I hear that a lot, and it is almost never true. So we are going to go through the four kinds of leverage a sitting tenant has, starting with the simple fact that an empty unit earns a landlord nothing. We will find the real vacancy rate on her street, work out what she can trade, and write a one-page proposal that turns a phone argument into a business conversation. Then she tells us what happened, and what she had to give up. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.