You will have some repairing responsibility under your lease. If you are leasing an entire building you may be responsible for keeping the structure and exterior in repair. Even if you are only taking a shop or an office unit and the landlords undertake all repairs to the structure and exterior, you will still have a liability to keep the interior of your premises in repair.
At the end of the lease, the landlords will carry out an inspection and produce a “schedule of dilapidations” detailing every minute detail of where the current state of the premises falls short of an “as new” condition. And then they will require you to pay to have the works done. That can be very expensive. Little things add up. With foresight at the start, you can reduce this risk.
A “schedule of condition” is how you prove at the end of the lease what condition the premises were in at the start of the lease.
First you need to consider precisely what your level of responsibility will be. A repairing covenant in a lease often requires the tenant to keep the premises in “good and substantial repair”. You need to check the draft lease to understand what level of repair is being proposed in your case. If the premises are not in good repair and condition now, there is a risk that the repairing covenant will require you to return the premises at the end of the term of the lease in a much better state.
To avoid that risk, you should seek to negotiate that your repairing obligation will not require you to hand the premises back in any better state of repair than they are in now.
A “schedule of condition” is how you prove at the end of the lease what condition the premises were in at the start of the lease. It will consist of verbal description of existing defects with photographs to prove it.
When you come to the end of the lease and the landlords check the premises to make sure that you have complied with your covenant to keep the premises in repair and to return them in that state at the end of the lease, they won’t be able to require you to pay to put them in any better state than they were at the start.