LEASE
Leases and agreements for lease
Long, heavily negotiated, then relied on for a decade. The break option, the review mechanism and the alienation provisions are the three parts anybody ever comes back to.
№ 01The paper
Leases, licences and everything that keeps the building running.
One heavily negotiated document and forty that nobody negotiated at all. The lease gets the attention, while the service contracts renew themselves in the background and account for a spend that has never been reviewed as a set.
LICENCE
Licences and short-term occupation
Serviced space, storage, parking, roof and riser access. Short documents that renew quietly and are rarely read again after the first year.
FACILITIES
Facilities and maintenance contracts
Cleaning, security, mechanical and electrical, waste, catering. Usually on the supplier's own terms, usually rolling, and together a large annual figure nobody has looked at in one place.
FIT-OUT
Fit-out and works contracts
Scope, programme, defects liability and retention. Signed by a project team that will have moved on well before the defects period ends.
№ 02Hard clauses
Four dates, and one of them is a trap.
Every position below is a named heading in the review list, which is why an incoming facilities contract can be sorted by what it will cost you rather than by clause number.
01Auto-renewal and the notice window
The window opens and closes before you are thinking about it
A contract that renews for another year unless notice is given between nine and six months before expiry gives you a three-month window, eighteen months after anyone last opened the document. Miss it and the decision has been made for you. This is the most common avoidable cost in a facilities portfolio.
02Termination rights
Conditional breaks that cannot be exercised
A break conditional on vacant possession, on all sums having been paid, and on full compliance with every covenant is a break a landlord can defeat on a technicality. The conditions matter more than the date, and both have to be recorded the day the lease is signed.
03Price increases
Uplifts that only travel in one direction
Indexed annual increases with a floor and no ceiling, service charge escalation with no cap, and a minimum uplift payable whatever the index did. Across a portfolio these compound, and no single one is ever large enough to trigger a review on its own.
04Change of control and assignment
Whether you can hand the space on
Assignment and subletting on consent not to be unreasonably withheld is the difference between an exit and a liability. Check what conditions attach to that consent, whether you stay on the hook after assigning, and whether the same right runs the other way.
05Warranties and service levels
Service credits as the only remedy
Facilities contracts commonly set response times, then make service credits the sole and exclusive remedy for missing them. That converts a persistent service failure into a small monthly discount. Keep a termination right for repeated failure alongside the credits.
06Indemnity
Who carries what happens on site
Contractor indemnities, required insurance levels and the interaction between the two decide who pays when something goes wrong in a building you occupy but do not own. Check that the indemnity is backed by insurance that exists and is maintained for as long as the risk does.
№ 03In Karyalo
How a property team runs this in Karyalo.
The failure mode in this sector is not a bad negotiation. It is a good contract that nobody looked at again until the window had shut, so the product is built around getting the dates off the page.
01
Dates lifted out of the document, then confirmed by a person
Karyalo reads the executed lease or service contract and proposes the obligations inside it: the notice window, the break date, the review date, the expiry. Each is accepted, edited or discarded by whoever knows the site, and nothing is saved until they agree to it.
02
The reminder arrives while you can still act
Renewal and notice dates are tracked against the contract itself, and a contract past its expiry date moves to Expired on its own with the change recorded. The portfolio stops depending on a spreadsheet somebody stopped updating.
03
Supplier terms reviewed against your standard
Write your positions on auto-renewal, uplifts, service credits and termination down once, then run every incoming facilities contract against them. Findings come back graded, each quoting the clause, with a redline you can accept into the text.
04
Every site's paper in one place
Each contract carries its full version history, its comment threads, and a timeline of everything that happened to it. When a lease is queried four years later the file answers, rather than the person who signed it.
№ 04Who handles it
Three desks, and one contract between them.
The dates outlive the people. Whoever inherits the portfolio inherits a set of deadlines they did not agree to.
Desk 01
The facilities or property manager
Owns dozens of contracts across several sites, and no two of them expire on a schedule anyone chose. Dated obligations replace the diary.
Desk 02
Procurement, retendering a contract
Cannot go to market without knowing the notice window, and needs incoming terms graded against a written standard rather than read line by line.
Desk 03
Finance, approving an uplift
Sees an increase on an invoice and needs the clause that permitted it. It is on the contract, quoted, with the version it came from.
Before the demo
Run one through the free review first.
Paste a lease or a facilities contract. It comes back graded against 17 positions, from limitation of liability to the time bar on bringing claims, each with the wording it found and a suggested redline. Three reviews a day, no account and no email address.
Open the free contract reviewNo 06Other industries
No 07Try it without an account
Free NDA generator
Draft a non-disclosure agreement for India, the US, the UK or the EU, with optional clauses for this industry.
Free contract reviewer
Paste the paper a client sent you and get it graded clause by clause.
Tell us about the renewal you nearly missed.
Thirty minutes. Bring one lease and one facilities contract, and we will pull the dates out, run your positions against the terms, and show you the reminder that would have caught it.