Our break clause is in eight months and the last time we looked at the lease was the day we signed it.
Occupiers lose money in three predictable places: break clauses missed, dilapidations claims accepted, and service charges never checked. All three are avoidable with a diary and somebody who acts.
Dinmore Bell reduces occupancy cost for tenants: exercising break clauses correctly and on time, challenging service charge apportionments and caps, and negotiating dilapidations before the landlord’s schedule sets the anchor. Lease surrenders and registration are handled by instructed solicitors, and dilapidations schedules by chartered building surveyors.
How we own it
Break clauses and reviews
Every date in the register with the conditions attached. Most breaks fail on a technicality rather than a decision. The technicalities recur. Notice served on the wrong party, because the reversion changed hands and nobody updated the record. Notice served by the wrong method, when the lease specifies recorded delivery and somebody emailed it. Notice served a day late. And, most expensively, a conditional break where vacant possession or payment of all sums due is a precondition, and a disputed service charge balance of a few hundred pounds is enough to invalidate the whole thing. That last one deserves emphasis because it is counterintuitive. A tenant can serve a valid notice, plan a move, sign a new lease, and still find the break failed because an item was outstanding on the day. Where the condition is absolute, the courts have shown very little sympathy. The work is therefore front-loaded: read the clause the moment the lease is signed, diarise backwards from the break date with a working margin rather than to the day, identify the conditions, and clear them well before the notice goes out. Rent reviews sit in the same register for the same reason, since an upward-only review left unchallenged sets the floor for the remainder of the term.
Dilapidations
The schedule challenged line by line, with a costed position agreed before you hand back the keys. The schedule arrives itemised and official, and the number at the bottom is a claim rather than a bill. It is a claim for damages, which means the landlord has to prove loss, and the loss is capped: damages for breach of a repairing covenant cannot exceed the amount by which the reversion has been diminished in value. Where a landlord intends to strip and refit the unit anyway, or to redevelop it, the diminution may be a fraction of the schedule or nothing at all. The practical sequence matters more than the legal argument. The first number on the table anchors everything that follows, so the tenant who commissions their own assessment before the landlord’s schedule lands is negotiating from a position rather than reacting to one. The second lever is timing: a claim settled before the lease ends, while the tenant still controls access and can do works themselves at trade cost, is almost always cheaper than the same claim settled afterwards at the landlord’s contractor rates. The third is simply reading the licence for alterations. Reinstatement obligations frequently turn out to be narrower than the schedule assumes, or to have been waived, or to attach to works the landlord actually asked for.
Service charge and rates
Apportionments, caps and sinking funds checked against the lease, and rates assessments challenged across every site. Service charge is the number that moves most over a ten-year term because it is the one nobody negotiates at the outset. Three things repay checking annually. First, the apportionment: whether the percentage charged still reflects the floor area demised, which frequently stops being true after the building is reconfigured or a neighbouring unit is split. Second, the cap, if the lease has one, and whether it has been applied, which is a surprisingly common omission. Third, the split between repair and improvement, since a landlord cannot generally recover the cost of giving the tenant something better than they had. Sinking fund contributions deserve their own look: whether the lease permits them at all, and what happens to the balance at the end of the term. Rates are a separate exercise with a separate timetable. Assessments across a multi-site estate are frequently based on floor areas that no longer exist or on a use that has changed, and the challenge runs to the Valuation Office with statutory deadlines that do not move. The recovery is retrospective as well as forward-looking, which is what makes it worth the effort.
Multi-site estates
The arithmetic changes with the number of sites. One lease is a document; fifteen leases are a portfolio, and a portfolio has patterns worth finding. The same landlord or managing agent will often apply the same treatment across several units, so an apportionment error found on one site is worth testing on the rest. The same is true of rateable values assessed on a common basis. A single challenge run properly on one unit becomes a template for the others at a fraction of the cost. The register is what makes this possible: every break, review, expiry and renewal date across the estate in one place, with an owner against each. Businesses with multiple sites rarely lose money because they made a bad decision about a lease. They lose it because nobody was looking at all of them at once.
The same problem in Dubai
Occupiers running sites in both the UK and the UAE meet a comparable set of costs in a different legal frame: Ejari registration, the service charge regime for owners’ associations, escalation provisions on renewal, and the relationship between a free zone licence and the premises it is tied to. The discipline transfers even where the law does not. Holding both estates in one function means the same person sees the whole occupancy cost rather than two halves of it.
Where specialists come in
Lease surrenders, assignments and registration are handled by instructed solicitors; building surveys and dilapidations schedules by chartered surveyors. We set the strategy and control both.
Related results
All results →Services we run here
Related insights
All insights →Your break clause is a deadline, not an option
Most break clauses fail on a condition nobody read, not on a decision anyone took.
Where nine per cent of your revenue goes
Contract value rarely leaks in a single expensive event. It leaks quietly, through renewal dates nobody owns.
- We missed the break notice date. Is there anything at all to be done?
- Occasionally. Check whether the lease contains a later break, whether the landlord has a commercial reason to accept a surrender, and whether anything in the landlord’s conduct since amounts to a waiver or estoppel. None of these is reliable, which is why the date itself is the thing to protect.
- How much of a dilapidations schedule is usually negotiable?
- More than the document suggests, because it is a claim for damages rather than an invoice and the landlord must prove loss. Where the landlord intends to refit or redevelop, the statutory cap on damages by reference to diminution in the value of the reversion can reduce the figure substantially.
- When should we commission our own dilapidations assessment?
- Before the landlord’s schedule arrives, typically twelve to eighteen months before lease end. The first number on the table anchors the negotiation, and a tenant who still controls access can carry out works at trade cost rather than paying the landlord’s contractor rates afterwards.
- Can we challenge a service charge we have already paid?
- Often yes, within the limits the lease and the limitation period allow. Payment without reservation weakens the position but does not usually extinguish it, particularly where the challenge is to an apportionment that was wrong throughout rather than to the quality of a particular item of work.
- What is the most common service charge error you find?
- An apportionment percentage that stopped matching the demised floor area after the building was reconfigured, and a contractual cap that exists in the lease but has never been applied. Both are arithmetic rather than argument, which makes them the fastest recoveries available.
- Do you handle business rates as well?
- Yes, as part of the same occupancy cost review, run to the statutory timetable with specialist ratings surveyors instructed where a formal challenge and valuation evidence are required. The recovery is usually retrospective as well as forward-looking.
- We have twelve sites and no register. Where do we start?
- With the leases themselves, however incomplete the file is. Building the register takes two to four weeks for an estate of that size, and the first pass routinely finds a break date inside the next year that nobody had diarised, which normally pays for the exercise on its own.
- Does Dinmore Bell act on the property transaction itself?
- Lease surrenders, assignments, new lettings and Land Registry work are conducted by instructed solicitors, and dilapidations schedules and ratings valuations by chartered surveyors. Dinmore Bell runs the register, takes the commercial negotiation, and instructs and manages those specialists where the matter requires them.