How to Decide Whether a Repair Is the Landlord or Tenant Responsibility

This question causes more friction in small commercial property than the repairs themselves. It
is rarely about money alone — it is about each side feeling the other is taking advantage, and
it recurs because the reasoning behind each decision is never written down.

What follows is a way of reasoning about it. The specific rules that apply to your property will
depend on your lease and on where you are, and you should confirm anything significant with
someone qualified locally. But the structure of the question is consistent.

Start with the lease, always

The lease is the agreement. Whatever custom has grown up, whatever the previous owner did, the
document is the starting point.

Read the repairing obligations properly once, and make a note of what they actually say about:
the structure and exterior, the interior, plant and services, glass, and anything installed by
the tenant. Most disputes involve one of those five.

Doing this once, carefully, when there is no live argument, is far more productive than reading
it in the middle of one.

Then ask what kind of fault it is

Where the lease does not resolve it cleanly, the useful second question is about the nature of
the fault rather than its location.

• Wear from ordinary use — generally falls where the lease puts that part of the property.
• A failure of something that was always going to fail — plant reaching the end of its life
  is usually an ownership question rather than a usage one.
• Damage from a specific event or misuse — points toward whoever caused it, regardless of
  what the item is.
• A consequence of an alteration the tenant made — usually follows the alteration.

These are not rules. They are the questions that tend to resolve the ambiguity once the lease
has narrowed it.

Separate urgency from liability, firmly

The most damaging pattern is leaving something unrepaired while the responsibility is argued.

Decide who fixes it now and who pays for it as two separate questions, in that order. Get the
water stopped, then work out whose it was. A landlord who acts first and settles afterwards is
in a much stronger position than one who waited, both practically and in the relationship.

Say this explicitly when you do it — "I am getting this dealt with today, we can settle where it
sits afterwards" — so acting is not mistaken for accepting.

Write down the reasoning, not just the outcome

This is the step that stops the same argument recurring.

When a decision is made, record: what the issue was, what the lease provision was, what was
decided, and why. Three or four sentences. Send it to the tenant.

The value shows up the second and third time something similar happens. Without a record, each
instance is negotiated from scratch and inconsistently, which is what makes a tenant feel
treated arbitrarily. With one, the answer is already established and usually accepted.

Build a short precedent list

After a year, those notes become a list of settled questions for your property. Blocked drains.
Broken glass. Failed water heater. Roller shutter damage. Internal decoration.

Keep it as a single page. It makes you faster, keeps you consistent across tenants, and is
genuinely useful to hand to anyone who manages the property in your absence.

Handle genuine ambiguity by splitting

Some cases are honestly unclear — an old component that failed earlier than expected because it
was used heavily.

Proposing a split is often better than winning. The cost of the argument, in time and in the
relationship with a tenant you would like to keep, frequently exceeds the sum in dispute.

Record a split as a split, with the reason, so it does not become the assumed precedent for
everything afterwards.

Revisit at renewal, not mid-term

If the same category keeps causing disputes, the lease wording is the problem and the time to
address it is at renewal.

Note the recurring ones as they happen so the list exists when negotiations come round. Trying
to reinterpret a repairing obligation in the middle of a term is rarely productive and usually
damages the relationship you are about to have to renew.