Business Property Lease Issue

[Jobbo]

red_slr said:

surveyor said:

Rent passing has no effect.

What does this mean, sorry!

It means that if you use the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954 procedure to force them to renew the lease, the rent you will pay for the renewed lease is not necessarily related to the old rent at all.

[Vocal Minority]

red_slr said:

Oh and as for redevelopment or owner occupation. First one is possible I guess but difficult - its on a large industrial area there is no chance of housing etc so they would have to maybe build new units or something? Second - owner occupation - again possible but they are retired now and would have no purpose for it. It would also cost them c. £20k a year in rates, insurance and general upkeep so I cant see them doing that.

I genuinely think they just think it comes to the end of the agreement and we move out?

The potential to will not be enough - onus is on them to demonstrate a genuine intention to do what they say they want to, to be allowed to oppose the lease renewal.

As said above - passing rent is what you are paying now. They will have no consideration to this when setting the current rent (or at least they shouldn't given sufficient evidence).

edit to clarify in bold

Edited by Vocal Minority on Thursday 5th March 17:31

[red_slr]

Thanks for that.
Also, renewing the lease is not actually what we want (that's all good info though) - we want to purchase the property as we ALL agreed 5 years ago.
So in reality we are looking to enforce that verbal contract we had. Just how possible that will be I am not entirely sure!!

[olivebrown]

I doubt you can force them to stick to their word and sell you the property under some sort of enfranchisement, not that i'm aware of.

I really think you should forget the purchase of freehold for now and really focus on getting a lease renewal as timings are crucial here and missing your window of opportunity will leave disadvantaged greatly.You should issue a s.26 notice to force them to renew. You need to issue you s.26 notice between six and 12 months before the end of the tenancy. You also need to do this before they serve their s.25 notice to end the tenancy, as then you cannot issue a valid s.26 form. If they do want to force you out, they can only do so if they can apply either one of the grounds set out under LTA s.30, which is difficult to do also without genuine intention.

[Jobbo]

Jobbo said:

The option to purchase sounds like it won't be enforceable; that's a property contract and to be valid that needs to be in writing and signed by the parties. I assume they didn't sign the piece of paper recording what had been agreed?

I don't think you're going to have a hope of purchasing the freehold, as I said above.

[surveyor]

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