Commercial Landlord Legal Responsibilities: What You Must Do Before and During a Let
- Before letting you need a valid EPC rated E or above, and you cannot lawfully let below that without a registered exemption.
- Asbestos follows the maintenance obligation: if you maintain the fabric, the duty to manage it is yours.
- Common parts, shared plant and shared water systems stay with the landlord in a multi-let building, including their fire, electrical, gas and legionella duties.
- The lease can allocate who does the work, but it cannot remove a statutory duty from the person the law places it on.
Plenty of commercial landlords assume a full repairing and insuring lease hands the whole compliance burden to the tenant. It hands a lot of it over, but not all, and some of what stays with the landlord carries the biggest penalties. This guide sets out what you have to do before you let, what remains yours during the term, and where the line with the tenant falls.
Before you let
EPC and MEES. You need a valid EPC to market the property and, under the minimum energy efficiency standard, a rating of E or better to let it. Letting below E without a registered exemption attracts penalties of up to £150,000 per property. If the building is close to the line, get the EPC done early so there is time to improve it.
Asbestos. For a building built or refurbished before 2000, you need a management survey, a register and a plan before anyone works on the fabric. A tenant fitting out without that information is a risk to them and to you.
Fire safety. Carry out or update the fire risk assessment for the parts you control, and hand the tenant the information they need to assess their own demise: the fire strategy, the alarm and detection arrangements, escape routes through common parts.
Services. A current EICR, gas safety record and, where relevant, TM44 report for anything you are handing over demonstrates the building is safe at the start of the term. It also protects you at the end, when the dilapidations argument begins.
During the term: what stays with you
Common parts. In a multi-let building you are the responsible person for fire safety in the common parts under the Fire Safety Order: the assessment, the alarms, the lighting, the extinguishers, the escape routes and the fire doors between units.
Shared plant. Central boilers, lifts, air conditioning serving more than one tenant, and the electrical installation up to each tenant's distribution board. The gas, electrical and TM44 duties on that plant are yours.
Water systems. Where you control the tanks, calorifiers and risers, you are the duty holder under ACoP L8 for the legionella risk assessment and monitoring of the shared system.
Asbestos. The duty to manage sits with whoever has the obligation to maintain or repair the premises. If that is you under the lease, the register and plan are yours to keep current and to share with contractors.
Structure and fabric. The maintenance duty on the building itself, which is where a planned maintenance survey gives you a programme instead of a string of emergencies.
What the lease can and cannot do
A lease can decide who does the work and who pays. It cannot change who the law holds responsible. If you are the responsible person for the common parts, you remain so even if the service charge recovers the cost from the tenants. If the tenant is the employer in the demise, they are the responsible person there, whatever the lease says about repairs.
The practical answer is to make the lease match reality: set out who inspects, who maintains and who keeps the records for each duty, and keep copies of each other's certificates. Where a lease is silent, agree it in writing. The risk is never that both sides do the work. It is that each assumes the other has.
Check a property you let
Run the free compliance check for the building and get a quote for each duty that sits with you.
The records to keep
For every duty that sits with you: the assessment or report, the date, who carried it out, what was found and what was done about it. Insurers ask for these at renewal, buyers ask for them in due diligence, tenants ask for them at lease events, and enforcement officers ask for them after an incident. Our guide to compliance records sets out what to keep and for how long.
Checking a property you let
The free compliance check takes seven questions about the building and lists every duty that applies, so you can see which sit with you and get a quote for each. For a portfolio, run it per building.
Sources & further reading
- GOV.UK: non-domestic minimum energy efficiency standard — the landlord’s EPC duties and penalties
- Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, regulation 4 — the duty to manage follows the maintenance obligation
- GOV.UK: workplace fire safety, your responsibilities — who the responsible person is
- HSE: Legionnaires’ disease, ACoP L8 — the duty holder for water systems
External links open in a new tab. ComSurv is a matching service, not a firm of surveyors, and is not affiliated with these organisations. This article is general information, not legal, surveying or valuation advice; take advice on your specific situation.
