Which commercial lease dates belong in your calendar, and how far ahead?

A commercial lease is signed once, filed, and then not reopened until something forces it. In between, it contains a small number of dates that are expensive to miss and easy to miss, because none of them announce themselves.

The pattern is consistent: the obligation sits in a document nobody reads, the reminder does not exist, and the date passes. What makes it expensive is that most of these dates are one-way. There is no process for exercising an option after the window closes.

The dates that matter

Option exercise window. The period during which you may extend the lease. Usually a window rather than a date, for example, not earlier than six months and not later than three months before expiry. Missing the start is harmless. Missing the end means the extension is gone and you are negotiating from a much worse position, or moving.

Lead time: set a reminder six months before the window opens, and a second one two weeks before it closes.

Rent review dates. Fixed increases, CPI adjustments or market reviews, depending on the lease. Market reviews often carry their own notice and objection periods, and those periods are short.

Lead time: three months before the review date, plus a hard reminder tied to any objection window.

Bank guarantee expiry. Where a bank guarantee was provided, it may have its own expiry independent of the lease term. An expired bank guarantee can be a default under the lease, and the tenant is usually the only party who will notice in time to prevent it.

Lead time: four months, because replacing one involves a bank.

Insurance certificate renewal. Most leases require evidence of insurance to be provided annually. Nobody follows this up until an incident, at which point the gap is a problem.

Lead time: one month before the policy renews.

Make-good obligations. What condition the premises must be returned in, and by when. This is the one that surprises people, because the obligation is defined at signing and assessed at exit, and the assessment can be a substantial number.

Lead time: twelve months before expiry, so there is time to price it and to negotiate it as part of any extension.

Assignment and subletting consent. Not a date, but a trigger: if the business is being sold, or the space is being shared, the lease almost certainly has something to say about it and the consent process takes longer than the transaction timeline assumes.

Lead times are the whole design

A reminder that fires on the date itself is not a reminder, it is a notification of failure. The lead time has to be long enough to complete whatever the date requires, and that varies enormously: two weeks for a letter, four months for a bank instrument, twelve months for a make-good assessment and negotiation.

So the register stores two things per obligation: the date, and the lead time. The reminder fires at date minus lead time. Storing only the date is the most common way a lease register gets built and the most common reason it does not help.

Make sure a reminder reaches a person

A date in a shared calendar with no owner is a date nobody actions. Every entry needs a named role attached (not a person, a role) so that the reminder arrives somewhere that still exists after a resignation.

The practical arrangement that works: one register, one owner role, and reminders that go to that role with the document attached or linked. Attaching the document matters. A reminder that says "lease option window opens" and nothing else requires the recipient to go and find the lease, which adds a step at exactly the moment they are busy.

Building the register

For each premises, record the document set first: the lease, every variation, any side letter, the bank guarantee, and the insurance certificates. Side letters are the ones that get lost, and they are frequently where the commercially significant terms sit.

Then extract the dates. This is a reading exercise, and it is worth doing over the whole document rather than by searching for date-shaped text, because several of these obligations are expressed as periods relative to other events rather than as dates.

Then set the lead times, assign the owner role, and write down how a new premises gets added, because the register that only covers the premises you had when you built it is a register that expires.

The boundary

Extracting a date and setting a reminder is filing work. What an obligation actually requires of you, whether a review has been correctly calculated, and how to respond to a landlord are questions for your own external adviser.

The register does not answer them. It makes sure they get asked while there is still time for the answer to be useful, which is the part that usually goes wrong.