Oh, The Fun and Games Of Trying To Navigate A Shop Lease
This week I am playing a game of who blinks first. Or that is how it feels.
So remember last week’s exciting news of having an offer accepted on a shop to rent? Well, it doesn’t take many days before the whole process gets extremely confusing. Let me walk you through it.
When you put an offer in on a commercial let, you need to put together a proposal. This consists of things like: how long you would like the length of your lease to be; whether there will be any break clauses in it; whether these break clauses will be mutual or one-sided; which parts of the building you will be responsible for.
I think I’ve told you before that most commercial landlords will expect you to take a full repairing lease, which means even if the roof is two floors above you and is separated by two residential properties, if something goes wrong with it, you are expected to cough up. This makes setting up a new business feel very scary, particularly at a time when you’re already taking on many risks like committing to pay rent for a number of years.
Anyway, one of the items in my proposal was that I only wanted an internal repairing lease, which means anything outside of the property would be the landlord’s responsibility not mine. When my offer was accepted, I understood it had been with this part of the proposal also accepted. Oh no reader, I was wrong.
So after an offer has been accepted, you proceed to drafting Heads of Terms, and when I received them last week, the points I’d put in my proposal – the terms of which I believed the offer had been accepted – were not there, and instead the landlord’s terms were. I asked the estate agent how that had happened and he said it was because the landlord hadn’t accepted my terms (news to me!), and so if I didn’t accept their terms, I then needed to submit a counter offer based on the Heads of Terms. Which I did, reiterating what I had put in my original proposal. Which I thought had been accepted. When they accepted the offer. Which took two weeks in the first place.
Gah! Do you feel my frustration?!
Anyway, the reason I am sharing this with you is because well, you signed up to come on this journey with me, and so I think it’s helpful to know each bump in the road along the way.
I don’t know what will happen next. The landlord is a big fish, I am a small fish. They may decide that they don’t need to negotiate with little fish (interesting fact I learnt this week, the plural of fish is fish, unless it features fish of various breeds, then it is fishes).
I’ve decided, I can only take risks I am comfortable with. As with all things in life we need to be fatalistic. If it is mean to be, it will happen for me. If it is not, it won’t.
I’ll keep you updated, of course.
What I’m Reading This Week
There has been a bit of a trend in recent years for postpartum psychosis memoirs, something that you might think might be a bit of a niche market, but it turns out not.
One that I enjoyed was INFERNO by Catherine Cho, and of course there is the classic THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, which I only actually got round to reading last year.
Recently, I was sent a new Faber edition of THE SHUTTER OF SNOW, a perfectly disorientating little book originally published in 1930 after the author, Emily Holmes Coleman’s brush with postpartum psychosis left her in what was then called a mental asylum. It is billed by Faber as the foremother of Sylvia Plath’s THE BELL JAR (visitors to my pop-up might remember I had on sale beautiful illustrated editions of THE BELL JAR which you can find here).
But THE SHUTTER OF SNOW is a perfect example of how it is not always what we say but how we say it in prose that creates atmosphere, and this book does that perfectly. It is something that I did in SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW which of course takes a look at the world through the eyes of someone with dementia.
THE SHUTTER OF SNOW also happens to have a very beautiful cover, which always helps, and you can buy it here.
One Last Thing – A Thank You
Remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned that I might make some parts of this newsletter paid? Well, a few subscribers left at the thought, and others wrote to me with feedback that they wouldn’t pay to read my words (I appreciate that far more than people disappearing!), so I lost my nerve in terms of charging for my words, however I’ve had a few notifications recently that some people have decided to pay off their own backs and I wanted to say a thank you to them – it is so nice to feel valued.
I believe that you can pledge to support me with a one off payment, or you can subscribe for £5 a month, or you can give a gift subscription, though I’m not sure how that works as I’m a bit rubbish at these things, but you can press the button below and find out.
Anyway, the long and short of it is, you don’t need to do any of these things, all my posts will remain free, just buy books from THE BOOK ROOM – that would make me very happy (remember I can order any book, not just the ones on my virtual bookshelves, just click ‘custom order’ in the menu). But if you do decide to upgrade and pay to subscribe, just know how much I appreciate that gesture in these difficult times. Thank you.
