Commercial Lease Agreement - Careful What you Sign

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Lease Agreements
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Have you ever been in business and thought
“We’re going to need some premises, let’s go and lease some premises because we haven’t got the money to buy, but we don’t mind renting”, and the landlord presents you with a lease agreement and you have a quick flip through it, and you see
“Yes that looks all looks fine and dandy, it’s the premises we want , it’s the price we want, and I see here that we’re responsible for various things, and we’re responsible for repairs.”
You need to be VERY wary before you sign anything.
Make sure that you’ve read it, and make sure that you understand it.
Because if you sign a document including a lease agreement, a commercial document without reading it, legally you’ve understood it, even if you’ve not read it.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve read it you don’t understand it, if you sign it, you agree to it and you understand it.
So don’t sign anything unless you understand it.
Commercial lease agreements have generally got one clause in which is to be avoided like the plague.
There are lots of clauses in it. Sometimes they could run to a lot of pages.
The one clause you want to avoid, which will be hidden in there somewhere, is the one about repairs.
Now don’t get me wrong, generally, a lease will require you to do repairs. That’s not a problem.
It’s the wording of the repairing clause that’s a problem for you, because it will say quite innocently, the tenant’s responsible for keeping the building in good and tenantable repair.
Now that seems ok doesn’t it? Wrong! That really, really is NOT ok.
If that clause is in the lease, commercial lease, and you move into the property, and when you move in it’s a bit dilapidated, it looks a mess, and you do a lot of work to it and it looks pretty good you’d be justifiably pleased with yourself.
And then a few years later, whatever, you decide you want different premises, you want to move, you want larger premises, you want smaller premises and you come to move out.
And you’ve kept the place in reasonable repair; in fact it’s in much better condition than it was when you moved in.
Did you know that the landlord is entitled because of that clause, I’m going to repeat it for you in a minute, because of that clause he’s entitled to have the property put back into good condition, even though it was a mess when you moved in.
Remember the wording of the clause. The tenant’s to keep the property in good and tenantable repair.
That means that if it’s a mess when you move in, it’s got to be in good and tenantable repair when you move out.
Avoid that phrase!
What you want to do is add in something, and the sentence that you add in is really simple, and it can save you thousands, if not tens of thousands of pounds.
And that clause is: that the tenant’s to keep the property in good and tenantable repair, BUT this clause doesn’t require the tenant to put the property into any better condition than at the date of the lease.
What that means is that if it’s a mess when you move in, it’s ok if it’s a mess when you move out.
Of course you’re going to have to prove what kind of mess it was when you moved in.
But that’s easy. You just take hundreds of photographs and get the other side, the landlord, to agree that’s a fair assessment of the state, the condition of the place.
Repairing covenants in commercial leases.
They can cost you tens of thousands of pounds, and they’re so easy to sort out in the first place.
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