MARC RESTAURANTS

CLIENT BRIEFMarc is a corporate occupier being restauranteurs. They hold leases on restaurants and offices in Central London including the building above. Ask-re was instructed to negotiate the rent reviews on the basement/ground floor restaurant and a floor of offices above. As part of the negotiations, Ask-re also investigated the service charges which were running at over £14psf for the offices, a figure that was extremely high.

Issues in the case:1. High levels of service charge demands. 2. Unresponsive service being provided to tenants. 3. Lack of response on service charge matters.

OUR PROFESSIONAL APPROACH1.Assess the responsibilities and liabilities of both landlord and tenant under the leases. 2. Investigate the management regime at the property. 3. Carefully investigate and analyse the service charge demands.4. Analyse and check whether the service charges were being correctly apportioned between the various tenants. 5. Check ‘value for money’ of the various services. 6. Check that the Landlord was charging for the correct items and not trying to pass on landlord’s liabilities 7. Liaise with other tenants 8. Work with the landlord to reduce costs and to terminate certain unnecessary and highly expensive services that were not required by the tenants.

THE SUCCESS STORY1. Finding errors in the service charges demanded of our client. 2. Negotiating with the landlord to reduce the level of service charges through the termination of services that were not wanted by the tenants. 3. Managing to reduce the future service charges by some 35%.