How long does a commercial lease take? For most straightforward deals, you’re looking at four to eight weeks through the traditional solicitor route, sometimes longer.
You’ve found the unit. You’ve shaken hands on the deal. The rent’s agreed, the term’s agreed, everyone’s happy. Now you just need the paperwork done.
And that’s where things tend to grind to a halt.
What “Completing a Lease” Actually Involves
When both sides instruct solicitors, which is what usually happens, the process follows a fairly predictable pattern. It just doesn’t follow a predictable timeline.
It starts with the landlord’s solicitor drafting the lease, which takes a week or two depending on how busy they are. That draft goes over to the tenant’s solicitor, who reads through it, raises questions, and sends back a list of changes they want.
Then the real waiting begins. The two solicitors bat the document back and forth, tweaking clauses, querying wording, going back to their respective clients for sign-off on each round of changes. One round might take a few days. Another might sit in someone’s inbox for a fortnight.
On top of that, there might be a rent deposit deed to sort out, documents dealing with the 1954 Act if the lease is being contracted out, or consent needed from a lender or a superior landlord. Each one adds its own timeline.
By the time everything’s agreed, engrossed, signed and completed, you’re typically looking at four to eight weeks for a straightforward lease. Complicated ones regularly stretch past three months.
How Long Does a Commercial Lease Take, and Why?
A few things tend to drag things out:
People are busy. Solicitors have other clients. Landlords have other things going on. Every time someone takes a few days to respond, the whole process stalls.
Scope creep. What starts as a simple lease can snowball when solicitors raise points that weren’t covered in the heads of terms. They’re usually doing it to protect their client, but it adds weeks.
Third parties. If there’s a mortgage on the property, the lender might need to approve the lease. If the property is itself leasehold, the freeholder might need to consent. These people don’t work to your timetable.
Genuine complexity. Some deals really are complicated: agreements for lease with works conditions, multi-unit lettings, unusual break clauses. Those take longer for good reason.
But here’s the thing that frustrates a lot of landlords and tenants: for most straightforward commercial lettings, the actual substance of the deal was agreed in about twenty minutes. It’s the process of documenting it that takes months.
What This Costs You
For landlords, every week of delay is a week of lost rent, and you might still be paying business rates on an empty property. For tenants, it’s a week where you can’t trade from the premises you’ve already committed to.
If the rent is £2,000 a month and the process takes eight weeks, that’s roughly £4,000 in lost income for the landlord. Often more than the solicitor fees themselves.
There Is a Quicker Way
We built Aqqord specifically to fix this problem.
It’s an online platform where landlords and tenants agree and complete commercial leases directly. The legal drafting has already been done. Each lease is generated from your heads of terms, using a clause library our SRA-regulated solicitors wrote and continue to oversee, with wording that’s fair to both sides.
So the process looks like this: you enter the property details and your proposed terms. You invite the other party to review and negotiate those terms online. You both sign digitally. Done.
The draft lease is ready in minutes. How long the rest takes depends on both sides. SDLT or LTT and Land Registry registration are your responsibility, and Aqqord can assist with both. For information on lease registration requirements, visit HM Land Registry.
A real example. In July, a landlord’s office rang us on a Tuesday morning. Their solicitor was away that week, and they had a tenant ready to take a unit who wasn’t going to wait. The terms were already agreed, so they signed up that morning, entered the heads of terms and let the platform draft the lease. The tenant read it, verified their ID and signed online. By Wednesday afternoon the lease was signed by both sides and complete.
Not every lease goes that quickly. It depends on both sides being ready to move. But when they are, the paperwork doesn’t have to be what holds the letting up.
If you’re also wondering about the costs involved, read our guide on commercial lease solicitor fees.
Will Aqqord Work for My Commercial Lease?
For the kind of commercial lease that makes up the vast majority of the market, such as retail units, small offices, workshops and storage spaces: yes, absolutely.
For genuinely complex transactions, such as major redevelopments, bespoke legal structures or multi-million-pound headquarters, you’ll still want solicitors involved. That’s fine. Aqqord isn’t trying to replace solicitors on complex deals.
But for the everyday commercial lease where both sides just want to get on with it? There’s no good reason it should take two months.
