Depending on your type of business and the layout of your premises, you might want to allow someone else to work from part of the premises, to share costs. In the post-Covid working environment, “hot desking” is an important new option for conducting business. Many businesses don’t need all their space all the time; and other businesses just need access to some fixed premises on an occasional basis.
Your lease will probably say “no sharing”, unless you negotiate a slightly more relaxed arrangement.
Traditionally, there has really only been one situation in which landlords accept the need for tenants to be able to share their premises. That is when the tenant is one of a group of companies. One company in the group may be the tenant, but that will not necessarily be the company which will exclusively be doing business from those premises. The tenant company might just be the company the group uses when it leases premises and it might not do any other business itself. It’s quite normal, in that situation, for the landlords to agree that the tenant company can share the premises with any other company in the group – provided that no form of legal tenancy is created in the process.
This won’t help you, if you are taking your first premises in your own name or trading through a single company. Unless you negotiate something specific on sharing rights, your solicitors will receive a draft lease absolutely banning you from sharing the premises.
So, at the outset you should seek to negotiate a similar arrangement as that available to groups of companies – which is that you can allow others to share the premises provided that no tenancy is created.
You may find that you run up against a brick wall on this. Landlords – and their solicitors – are conservative. Not much changes in the traditional ways of letting property. And they may just not want to do it because it’s a new thing, even if they can’t come up with a convincing legal reason why not. You probably aren’t willing to lose the premises over it. But you should certainly try to get that restriction relaxed if you can, in case you need to use it. Nothing is lost in trying to negotiate that.