The seven lease clauses that cost dentists their practice

Your lease is the most valuable document in your practice and most dentists spend less time on it than they spend choosing a chair.

I understand why. It is fifty pages of language designed to be unreadable, your solicitor says it is "fairly standard", and you are excited about the unit. So you sign.

Then, five or eight years later, when you try to sell, a buyer's solicitor reads the same document properly and knocks a six figure sum off your valuation. Or refuses to proceed at all.

I have negotiated three of these and sold a practice at the end of one of them. Here are the seven clauses that matter.

1. Term length

Why it matters: you are about to spend £300,000 fitting out a building you do not own. A five year term does not give you long enough to earn that back, and it means that in year four you are negotiating from a position of total weakness, because the landlord knows your surgeries cannot move.

What to push for: fifteen years minimum, ideally twenty, with tenant only break options. A buyer will want to see at least ten years remaining when they buy from you, so a fifteen year term already limits your comfortable selling window to the first five.

2. The break clause, and whose it is

Why it matters: a landlord break clause is a loaded gun pointed at your business. If the landlord can end your lease at year seven, your practice is unsaleable from around year five, because no buyer will take on that risk.

What to push for: tenant only breaks. If the landlord insists on a mutual break, that is a serious problem and you should be prepared to walk away from the site.

3. Security of tenure

Why it matters: the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 gives business tenants the right to renew their lease. Many commercial leases ask you to contract out of it. If you do, when the term ends the landlord can simply take the building back, including your £300,000 fit-out.

What to push for: do not contract out. If you have to, understand exactly what you are giving up, and price the site accordingly.

4. Repairing obligations

Why it matters: "full repairing and insuring" sounds administrative. What it means in practice is that you are responsible for the entire building's condition, and at the end of the lease you may be handed a dilapidations claim for tens of thousands of pounds to restore it to a state it was arguably never in.

What to push for: a schedule of condition, photographed and attached to the lease, agreed before you sign. It caps your obligation at the state the building was in when you took it. This one document has saved people more money than any other item on this list.

5. Rent review mechanism

Why it matters: "upward only, open market" reviews mean your rent can rise and can never fall, regardless of what happens to the local market. Over a twenty year term that compounds into a serious number.

What to push for: index linked reviews with a cap and collar are far more predictable. Failing that, negotiate a cap on any increase.

6. Permitted use and alienation

Why it matters: these two clauses together decide whether you can ever sell. If the permitted use is drafted too narrowly, or if assignment requires landlord consent with no obligation to be reasonable, then your exit depends entirely on a landlord's mood in five years' time.

What to push for: permitted use broad enough to cover any dental or healthcare use. Assignment subject to consent "not to be unreasonably withheld or delayed". Those seven words are worth a lot of money.

7. The personal guarantee

Why it matters: most landlords will ask for one from a new company with no trading history. It means that if the practice fails, the lease follows you personally, for the full term.

What to push for: a cap, either in value or in duration. A guarantee that falls away after three years of clean payment history, or that is capped at twelve months' rent, is a completely different risk to an uncapped one running twenty years.

The pattern

Every clause on this list has the same shape. It costs nothing to negotiate at heads of terms stage, when the landlord wants a tenant and you have not yet committed. It costs a fortune to fix afterwards, when you have.

So the work happens before you sign, or it does not happen.

Inside the Dream Squat Club there is a lease review checklist that walks every one of these, plus a heads of terms template with the positions I actually take. It will not replace a solicitor and it is not meant to. It will mean you know what to instruct your solicitor to fight for.