Legal advice: Breaking your lease

WHAT HAPPENS when you want to serve notice on your landlord in order to move to different premises? You may have a right in your lease to serve notice to end it, but this may be subject to a number of conditions. To ensure you avoid any pitfalls you will need to seek advice from your lawyer and surveyor well in advance to check the exact requirements in your lease, but there are a number of issues that often come up.

Firstly, make sure you are entitled to exercise the right to break. Sometimes the right to break can only be exercised by the original tenant. If you are entitled, check the exact date on which the lease may be ended early. Break dates are often worded in an unclear way and you need to be sure that the date you put in your notice to the landlord is the correct one. Also consider that time limits have to be complied with. It is usual for the lease to say that the notice must be served before a specified date. Failure to comply with a time limit means the right to break the lease will be lost.

The lease may say you have to pay any outstanding sums due to the landlord, or specify that you must have completely or largely performed all your obligations, and give vacant possession of the premises. The conditions are applied strictly and you need to try to make sure that a minor breach of the lease does not stop you successfully ending the lease.

Finally, in order to serve notice on your landlord you should be aware that there are often strict rules regarding the addressee or the use

of special delivery. You need to make sure no mistakes are made on these technicalities, as this final point could jeopardise your opportunity to move on.