“I’ve got to be in before Christmas“. How often do commercial agents hear that from people setting up a new bar or restaurant and desperate to maximise the pre-Christmas party trade?
Perspective tenants are often like that. They have a deadline in mind. They are intent, quite understandably, on the start of their new business, on getting everything ready in time, and on resolving all the factors which are important to that first day of trading.
They forget that what they’re taking on is a lease for many years. They should really be focused on all the things that could be a problem over the medium to long term, not just issues for the first weeks.
Landlords are looking at things in reverse. They know they have to make concessions about the first few weeks, usually by giving a rent free period. What they are concentrating on is their rent over the full term of the lease, which will soon eclipse the rent-free period they had to give at the start. They are looking forward to rent reviews.
New tenants often make the mistake of concentrating on the short-term. Landlords are always thinking long-term.
When you start up your business, you not even thinking about the prospect of having to dispose of the premises in the future or selling the business. But the landlords are already building in terms into the draft lease to control future events – not just about how you can dispose of the premises, but also about what alterations you can do down the line, what uses the premises can be put to by new businesses, and so on. And – in each case – what you will not be allowed to do.
If you instruct a commercial agent like me to help you, these important issues can be handled for you, while you concentrate entirely on getting the business started up and running.
A professional commercial agent would be negotiating the clauses about assignments, underletting, charging, sharing, altering, changing the use… the list goes on … to get you a fair deal. You are already bored, because you are working out where to put the meeting rooms and how much to allocate to the cost of lighting. So, you go ahead. And leave the other stuff to the professionals, whose job it is to fine tune all these things.
When the time comes, in a few years time, when you want to alter the premises, or you want to sell the business, or you want to expand into some add-on business no one has thought of today, you will be so grateful you did this.