Insight
Planning a warehouse lease exit: a practical timeline
Most lease-exit problems come from compressed timescales rather than complicated works. Here is a practical order of events for clearing and reinstating a warehouse before handover.
Andrew Hunt
Director, Red & White Group · LinkedIn
Start with the date, not the scope
The handover date is the fixed point. Everything else — survey, clearance, reinstatement, final clean and inspection — has to fit behind it, in that order.
Working backwards from the date usually shows that scoping needs to start months earlier than expected, particularly where high-level access or specialist coatings are involved.
Get the scope agreed before pricing the work
Where a Schedule of Dilapidations exists, the negotiation sits between you and your surveyor. Contractors price the agreed outcome; they do not settle the schedule.
A clear, agreed scope avoids the most common cause of programme slippage: items appearing late and pushing everything else back.
Sequence clearance before make-good
Reinstatement in a part-full unit is slow and often has to be redone. Clearing first, then cleaning, then making good is faster overall even though it looks like a longer plan on paper.
Where operations continue, agree zones early so clearance can follow the business out of the building.
Document as you go
Photographs against each scope item make the final inspection far easier and give both parties a shared record of what was completed and when.
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