Duke Tower Kitchener | 39 fl | completed

[robdrimmie]

I wonder if there is a clause written in the rental contract that the lessor has to absorb penalty costs of the equipment breaks down for extended periods of time. Also I would think that if the crance needed to be replaced the rental company would have to eat that.

I have a small amount of experience working with construction rental equipment companies. Only a few months at a startup a few years back, so this is not an area I have extensive knowledge of. Part of my work there involved working with and modifying the system used to negotiate and sign contracts though, so I saw a lot of them.

In the case of equipment like excavators, backhoes and whatnot, those kind of liability clauses are very common, to the point where I'd say they are boilerplate except that specifics of each project often need to be calculated. For something like a pick up truck with a plow up front there are probably standard terms but for something like a crane it would likely be heavily customized.

A large part of the reason to rent this sort of equipment is specifically to push that liability for breakdowns affecting the schedule onto a different company. I think of it as being similar to tech companies who use cloud computing instead of their own data centre.