“My name is John Keller. I am a commercial estate agent and I run a family business called Jarvis Keller Limited. We are based in St John Street in Clerkenwell, London EC1.
I handle a lot of business lettings – shops, offices, bars, restaurants – for landlords in this part of London. But I have a particular fondness for acting on the other side – helping new tenants. And that’s something I can do for anyone looking to take premises anywhere in the London area.
“The work I enjoy most, and which gives me the greatest satisfaction, is negotiating the best terms on behalf of people starting out in business. You can’t really do that yourself, any more than you can carry out a medical on yourself. You need an expert, someone experienced, and that’s the service I offer.”
Taking new premises is a unique deal between you and your landlords. The landlords will be seeking to get everything their way, and you should be trying to ensure that everything is fair and reasonable. You won’t be entering into a standardised document or something you can rely on as being what everybody else signs. Each lease deal has its own specially drafted lease. This is drafted by the landlords’ side. Human nature being what it is, when there is a landlord-friendly option and a tenant-friendly option, they are likely to choose the landlord-friendly one every time. Someone like me can pick up on these points and argue for terms that protect you.
The most important moment in many lettings is not when you move in but when you move out of your premises. That’s when you may find that you have incurred a huge liability for putting the premises back into a perfect condition. Or you want to assign your lease to someone else, so you can expand into larger premises, but you find that there is some excessively tough provision in your existing lease which puts buyers off.
Rent reviews also can be a minefield. They are based, not on the property as it actually is, but on a hypothetical version, containing assumptions which are not actually true.
The work I enjoy most, and which gives me the greatest satisfaction, is negotiating the best terms on behalf of people starting out in business. You can’t really do that yourself, any more than you can carry out a medical on yourself. You need an expert, someone experienced, and that’s the service I offer.
You have to pay a fee, of course, but you should have the satisfaction of seeing immediate benefits in the terms and conditions you will be agreeing to, and you will see problems avoided upfront. It’s more than worth it.”
JOHN KELLER