So You Don’t Need A Lease

Many of us will remember that before the changes to the Retail Leases Act in 2006, landlords of retail premises could recover their legal and other costs of preparing formal leases from their tenants. The amendments severely limited that ability and some interesting practices have since developed. A natural consequence of the changes, but needless to say quite unintended by the Legislator, is that landlords are more reluctant to issue formal leases now than when they could pass on their costs. That is particularly so where a tenant exercises an option to take up a new lease after expiry of the existing lease.

A practice has also developed whereby retail landlords issue new leases on option exercise in the form of a document that refers to the expired lease. That leaves the tenant (and the landlord) with more than one document to refer to in order to find the terms and conditions of the lease. Sometimes the new watered-down document is then not registered.

Without a lease, or without a lease that is registered, the Land Titles Office would refuse to register any dealing by a tenant, for example a transfer of lease on sale of business by the tenant.

I have devised a very useful alternative to overcome all of the problems associated with these changes to the legislation and would be most pleased to assist you in this regard.