What is comparable evidence?
9 October 2026(2026-Oct: LinkedIn) It’s a legal term. From Living Waters Christian Centres Ltd v Fetherstonhaugh 1999, it means like-for-like in all respects as far as possible. The perfect comparable a rare thing, surveyors make technical adjustments and allowance to allow for differences.
What it’s not is picking a rent of another or other properties at random and merely adjusting for differences in position/location.
Rent buys more than location/position and floor space. It buys everything the lease says the tenant can and cannot do, and everything the lease does not mention. Naturally, landlords like to keep control of their properties. Allowing the tenant to do whatever the tenant likes is high risk. With shops, control is sometimes relaxed: instead of the tenant having to ask for the landlord’s consent for a change of use, in effect having to get the landlord’s approval for the tenant’s business idea, the permitted use is for example Use Class E. As most tenants mind their own business, this flexibility is rarely taken advantage of. However, a tenant’s choice of business that pleases a landlord in E(a) “for the display or retail sale of goods other than hot food principally to visiting members of the public” could easily turn into E(d) “for indoor sport, recreation or fitness, not involving motorised vehicles or firearms principally to visiting members of the public” before morphing into E(g)(iii) “any industrial process being a use which can be carried out in any residential area without detriment to the amenity of that area by reason of noise vibration smell fumes soot” and nothing the landlord can do.
Like-for-like in all respects is not confined to the overt. A lease, a commercial contract, is private and confidential between the parties. What a lease allows and prohibiits is just as important as what the property looks like on the outside. As Nick French, a senior lecturer and Donaldstons fellow in real estate at the University of Reading. writing in Estates Gazette 29 October 2005 “Comparable evidence needs to be verifiable in order to be acceptable in court (the potential final. arbiter of the valuation).”
Valuation is not only about numbers, not simply dividing the rent by floor area or ITZA; equally. if not more importantly, it is also about the wording and phrasing in the lease. With no standard lease for all commercial property, any difference between the wording in the lease of evidential premises compared to the wording in the lease of the property in question is crucial. In Flanders Community Centre Ltd v Newham London Borough Council 2016, the judge rejected the landlord’s evidence of comparables as unreliable – the lease terms were not available so it the judge could not consider whether they contained onerous terms.
At the negotiating stage, it doesn’t matter that one or both side’s evidence is not as thorough. On referral, a cavalier attitude in the face of thorough analysis is certain to lose.
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