When you take new premises, the chances are you will have to do a fair amount of internal work to make them suitable for your new business. You may need your own new flooring, partitioning, shelving and many other things, for the practical purpose of making the premises suitable for your business, and also to make them look fresh and new and inviting.
Depending on the precise wording of your new lease, some at least of these works may be alterations which are subject to a restriction that you cannot carry them out unless you first get the landlords’ written consent.
If you sign the lease and then ask the landlords for their written consent, they might say “no”! Then you will be running to your solicitors to check whether that’s what the wording of the lease allows them to do. (Hopefully, the solicitors will have amended the lease so that you have the right to do the works you actually want to do, or, if the landlord’s consent is required, but it cannot be withheld unreasonably.)
For this to work, you will need to have liaised with your solicitors when the lease was still under negotiation to make sure that there was nothing in your proposed fitting out works which could be refused by the landlords.
It’s really putting the cart before the horse to sign the lease and then ask the landlord’s approval of your proposed fitting out works. The sensible thing to do is to get them all figured out in advance, submit a detailed specification and drawings to the landlords, and get them approved at the same time as you enter into the lease. That’s the point at which you have any leverage with the landlords, and the landlords have an incentive to approve the plans in order to get the property let. Once the property is safely left, the landlords lose any incentive to be cooperative, more than they absolutely have to.
For this reason, you shouldn’t rely on playing it by ear once you move in. Hopefully you will have negotiated a rent-free period to cover the period of your works, so the sooner you can get those works completed, the sooner you can be trading – possibly even still using part of the rent free period.
The other issue about getting fitting out works approved in advance is the issue of costs. If you make an application to the landlords once the lease is already in force, they will charge you fees, including their solicitors fees, for providing you with a licence for alterations. That can be very costly. You must have the consent, so you don’t have much of a negotiating position in arguing about excessive legal fees. The landlord can’t charge any fees for approving the fitting out works in advance, that’s just all part of negotiating the deal. So getting a licence for alterations prepared in advance and signed at the same time as the lease will also save you a lot of fees.