Your landlord answers the telephone.
No managing agent stands between you and the owner of your building. Here is what that means in practice, on both sides.
What you can expect
- Response
- An answer on responsibility, not a referral
- Compliance
- Certification on a schedule, available on request
- Service charge
- Accounted for line by line, where one applies
- Renewals
- Discussed early, not at the deadline
Repairs
Tell us something has failed and you will hear back the same day with a decision, not a reference number. If the repair is ours it is instructed; if the lease puts it on you we will say so at once. What we try never to do is leave the question hanging, because an unanswered repair turns into an argument about six months of silence.
Safety and compliance
Fire risk assessment, electrical installation condition reporting, gas safety where applicable, asbestos management and energy performance certification are handled on a schedule rather than in response to an event. The certification is available to you.
Deposits
Deposits taken on assured shorthold tenancies are protected in a government-approved scheme, with the prescribed information provided within the statutory period.
Renewals
An empty unit costs us the rent, the empty rates and the price of finding someone new, which together dwarf whatever the last few percent was worth. So renewals get raised months ahead, while there is still room to discuss them.
Take your own advice before signing
- Worth doing
- Have a solicitor read the lease
- Understand the repairing obligations
- Ask what happens at the end
- Check the service charge history
Leases run for years and end with a dilapidations claim that almost nobody costs into the decision at the outset. Get a solicitor to read it. If the premises are central to how you trade, get a surveyor to look at the schedule of condition too — that document decides the size of the bill you receive at the end.
This is self-interested advice. Disputes at lease end are expensive and sour, and they begin with a tenant who did not realise what the repairing clause committed them to.
Nothing on this website is legal advice, and it is not a substitute for taking it.