UK commercial leases and licences and related legal documentation can be complex and difficult to decipher which often means that dilapidation claims can potentially be litigious.
Dilapidation liabilities vary from property to property as there are a host of factors that interplay – building age, type, character, location, lease clauses, licence obligations, extent of alterations undertaken, repairs undertaken or lack of repairs, the state of the economy and national and local property market, future landlord intentions, tax and legislation changes etc., the list goes on and on.
Statute in the form of Section 18 of The Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 places a cap on damages in dilapidations in England and Wales in certain circumstances.
Protocols and procedures for handling dilapidations claims initially set by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) have been affected by the introduction of the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) Pre-Action Protocol for Claims for Damages in relation to the physical state of Commercial Property at Termination of a Tenancy (The “Dilapidations Protocol”) which came into force on 1st January 2012.
Unravelling and understanding the realistic dilapidation liabilities of a particular property at a point in time requires a comprehensive and specialised understanding of how all these factors interplay.
Our specialist dilapidations surveyor has over 25 years experience assisting tenants to resolve the dilapidations jigsaw and help tenants mitigate landlord claims.