Your landlord already has property lawyers who know their portfolio inside out. How do operators keep pace?
Growing a hospitality business is exciting but when it comes to commercial property, it’s rarely straightforward. One minute you’re getting the keys to your next site, the next you’re faced with an interim schedule of dilapidations or a lease clause that needs urgent attention.
When you’re dealing with commercial property, the questions never stop. What does the repair obligation actually mean? The landlord wants to discuss the rent review – hasn’t there been some legislation about that recently? Or maybe you want to exit an underperforming site. What are your options?
These sorts of questions sit in your inbox. Not immediate priorities, they often get pushed down the priority list, becoming more urgent and more expensive the longer they wait.
You wish you could just run it past a lawyer. It’s probably fine, but a quick steer would help you make that decision now.
The truth is you can’t remember who you used for the last transaction. When you do find their details, they want to charge you a minimum fee and your ID is out of date and needs to be renewed. Can your shareholders take a selfie and upload three bits of ID between meetings?
Conversely, every landlord you deal with has their preferred lawyers already working on their portfolio. They know the lease inside out and have a draft ready to go before you’ve negotiated the fee and completed the KYC – ‘Know Your Customer’, the key step in verifying the identify of a business.
Time kills deals, and the operators who move fastest have the advantage.
REsource by Greenwoods is designed to give operators that advantage. It’s a legal subscription, built for hospitality businesses and restaurant groups that regularly deal with property questions but can’t justify or don’t want to hire a lawyer in-house.
You’re assigned a named lawyer who learns your business, your portfolio, your preferences and, more importantly, your risk appetite.
Operators frequently work with retained agents to assist with site acquisitions and disposals. Having retained legal support alongside that enables you to have terms sense-checked before they are agreed, so when wording inevitably needs to be tweaked down the line, no one will accuse you of mission creep.
The Real Estate team at Greenwoods are specialists in hospitality and leisure, having acted for restaurant groups and hospitality operators for many years. When a draft lease lands, there’s a team that understands exactly what you need from your premises.
If you have growth ambitions and are looking at multiple acquisitions each year, the value compounds. Every new location brings new negotiations, new landlords and new documents that need a proper pair of eyes. REsource means your legal support scales with you. If larger matters arise, you’re already working with a team that understands your business, so you’re not spending weeks getting a new firm up to speed. You’ll also benefit from preferred rates on larger projects.
At the other end of the real estate spectrum, there are break notices to serve, dilapidation schedules to respond to and lease renewals you need to serve notice on. With REsource, you’re not scrambling to find someone who can get up to speed with your portfolio fast enough to actually help.
One subscription. One named contact. No awkward conversations about scope every time a new question lands.
Because in property, timing tends to matter more than you think.
Find out more at Greenwoods.
