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Michael Lever

The Rent Review Specialist

A list of retailers and businesses with numerous branches that have entered administration and/or rescued and/or downsizing since 2003 and before. ABC and Year

(2026 June: LinkedIn) Many years ago, acting for a tenant, the landlord’s adviser was a chartered accountant. For my due diligence, knowing who I am dealing with, I contacted the Institute of Chartered Accountants to check the adviser was in fact a chartered accountant. No. The ICA immediately contacted him and required him to remove all mention from his website, notepaper, etc. He complied. The ICA thanked me for having brought it to their attention.

Last weekend while browsing on-line I came across a firm of commercial property surveyors of which I’d never heard. I haven’t heard of every firm, but what interested me was this firm’s several pages about rent review and why the firm should be instructed. The person to contact is an MRICS so I went onto RICS Find a Member and couldn’t find anyone of that name.

That didn’t surprise me. RICS Find a Member is an unreliable resource because to find someone you have to know two things you might not know: (1) their location, and (2) the name the RICS knows a member by, as distinct from the name the member uses on a daily basis*. Same evening, I emailed the RICS unable to find the person on FaM and asked whether a chartered surveyor; I attached pdfs of the firm’s website pages, and links.

[ * Some years ago, I was obliged to contact the RICS direct when I wanted to know whether the landlord’s surveyor was a chartered surveyor. I’d asked the surveyor direct for the name the RICS knew him by, but he wouldn’t tell me.]

The following morning, RICS Membership Support Person replied that the links suggest that the reference to MRICS is published on their official website. Person had checked the RICS member’s (sic) directory and the RICS system and confirmed that Mr X is not an RICS member as of that day. But the confirmation does not confirm that Mr X may not have been a member in the past.

That afternoon I replied to the Person, cc complaints@rics.org that surely the RICS should do something about it that day – immediately contact Mr X and tell him to remove all references to MRICS on the firm’s website and anywhere else. Either he is a chartered surveyor, or he isn’t; Person confirmed he isn’t.

RICS Complaints require completion of an on-line form, or by email. I had tried email by my cc: pointless. This form has been designed by myopia: having a narrow view of things. Nowhere on it is anywhere to report someone pretending to be an MRICS. Questions for which answers are optional must be answered regardless, or else the form won’t submit. I entered 123456 in the field ‘membership number’.

The Regulatory Support Team will review my concerns and respond within 42 working days. Meanwhile Mr X can continue taking on new business under false pretences.

(07/2026 LinkedIn views: >28,500)

(2026 June: LinkedIn) On lease expiry / renewal, landlords and tenants can add to their costs unnecessarily by discussing the matter with their solicitors.

For a renewal under LTA54 or grant of a new lease outside the Act, and where surveyors are instructed to negotiate the rent and outline terms and conditions for Heads of Terms, somewhere along the way solicitors will also be involved.

Except for some aspects of the instruction, most surveyors do not charge on a time-basis. Most solicitors however do charge on a time-basis. Not all solicitors do litigation so, where court procedures are involved, the conveyancing solicitor will recommend the client instructs litigation solicitors with whom the conveyancer has a working relationship.

Even if it’s the surveyor’s client to begin with, something all solicitors are prone to, unless the client specifically instructs otherwise, is assuming conduct of the matter.

Leaving it to the lawyers is commonplace. It is bad enough lawyers regarding Heads of Terms as the starting point for further negotiation in the drafting and approval of documents, sometimes resulting in one or both parties ending up with something different to what was agreed in principle – the client none the wiser until a rent review meets an experienced surveyor. (In a matter I’m involved with, had the solicitor been left to their own devices would have scuppered the entire deal.)

Litigation solicitors are something else. Part of their task is to try and settle the dispute without going to substantive hearing in court. They discuss with the client how to achieve that and set about it. Naturally, the client contacts the solicitor whenever something more to discuss. The clock is ticking. Advisers whose charges are time-based usually require an up-front payment. An up-front for example £750 to £1,000 at £350+VAT per hour doesn’t last long. One of the most profitable services provided by solicitors is an agreement to extend the end date of a s25 or s26 notice, a procedure to avoid the necessity for a court claim. After the initial drafting and approval, each subsequent agreement to extend is the same wording except for the extension date. Extensions are typically 3 months at a time, but can be shorter depending upon the circumstances. At approximately £750 + VAT for each extension, and 4 a year, the client would pay £3000 plus VAT. I rarely charge for drafting or approving extension agreements, all part of my service so anyone instructing me on a lease renewal would benefit. (This is not a hint: I have stringent criteria for taking on lease renewal instructions from new clients.)

A client discussing with a solicitor anything that the client’s surveyor could help with and/or would be the best person to deal with it is wasting money. In one case recently, a litigation solicitor charged my client tenant £10,000 ex VAT for what in theory made sense but in practice amounted to getting nowhere. I took over; Heads of Terms are with the conveyancers.

(LinkedIn: 1,694 views)

(2026 June: LinkedIn) Small to medium to big firms of surveyors want to give a good impression of the firm’s capabilities. In larger firms, fancy job descriptions are rife: ranging from the ubiquitous ‘Director’ to ‘Head of …’. Titles are good for outward impression, inquirers and clients like to know who they’re dealing with. It is of course not only property advisers that are into lawful misrepresentation, most if not all businesses nowadays are into giving the impression that the person whom the customer/client is dealing with has some level of authority. As I write this, I’m listening to David discussing with Tony Archer about being Chief Livestock Liaison.

Compared to agency commission instructions, commercial property professional services are the poor relation. In many firms, a department’s function is to deter clients from going elsewhere and taking their lucrative work with them. In some firms, rent reviews are loss-leaders. Although reasonable for clients to assume that a Head of Lease Advisory, for example, is bound to have a great deal of knowledge and know-how, in practice provided the surveyor knows more than the client that’s all that matters.

When negotiating a rent review, something that even ‘Heads’ stoop to, there is an unwritten rule that one side’s surveyor expects the other side’s surveyor to observe. Insisting compliance enables the insister to demolish the insistee’s stance. It is perhaps one of if not the most successful ways for a Head to achieve nil increase and reinforce relationship with a tenant client.

Long ago, in my newsltter, I wrote an article about combatting dynamic professionals. The first thing I do whenever communicating with someone never previously encountered is due diligence. Knowing who you are dealing with at rent review is essential. My reputation sometimes precedes me, but whether people that have never heard of me know who they’re dealing with just by reading my website content, no way.

Their clients don’t always realise this, at least not until it’s too late, but many surveyors want to get the job done as soon as possible so they can get on with the next. This attitude, more common than you might think, translates as can’t be bothered, simply not worth it as far as the surveyor is concerned. Is the client any the wiser? If that were possible, then they wouldn’t have instructed that firm in the first place. After all what sort of firm has people at the top of the ladder that allow people on the lower rungs anywhere near clients? The answer is firms whose main source of revenue is agency.

I think it’s a great pity that retiring principals of well-known firms whose professional integrity is undoubted sell to overseas agency-oriented companies, to be rebranded, their heritage erased. The systematic hoovering up of British firms is being replaced by mediocrity disguised as impressive and highlighting the shortage of surveyors that can do rent review properly.

(LinkedIn views: 572)

(2026 June: LinkedIn) In my opinion, valuation is about starting from scratch. Valuation based on evidence of what someone else has paid/rented for a different property is comparison. Knowing how to compare isn’t the same as knowing how to value.

In 2009, I was invited to talk to a group of surveyors, mostly, about how to value when there is no evidence. I thought very carefully while preparing my answer to read out loud and spent almost the entire time boring the audience. I didn’t set out to bore; on the contrary, it was a detailed explanation on how to value when there’s no evidence. I thought it fascinating and would hold people’s attention, but when I noticed a few people yawning I realised that what I was saying had become boring. The room wasn’t warm enough for people to yawn to stay awake. The possibility that what i was saying was so relaxing that yawning was the only way for them to avoid falling asleep. But if that were the case, then after I’d finished talking I would’ve expected some questions; most people departed as soon as they could. A couple of people did come up to me afterwards to ask questions, they were tenants, but none of the surveyors did.

I guess the answer I gave was not what they wanted to hear. Generally, people in property are very good at not listening to anything they don’t want to hear so maybe that attitude has rubbed off on their advisers. Perhaps explaining the difference between ‘need’ and ‘want’, a fundamental principle in marketing, was beyond them. Most surveyors are employees so don’t have any experience of being employers, let alone setting up on their own. When advising company directors and proprietors it’s important to have an understanding, personal experience even, of how a business is run. Contributing ideas and solutions for dealing with the sort of issues that bosses have to deal with regularly appeals to clients. For example, how to be rid of troublesome employees without being taken to an employment tribunal. How a corporate tenant can get rid of a lease without losing the company name. As I say to surveyors whenever they want me to take client’s instructions, I’m not a messenger boy, I’m a professional adviser.

The main reason that valuation is done by analogy is laziness. It’s much easier, quicker, and more profitable for surveyor revenue to assume that what someone else has paid for something else would be paid pro-rata for the property in question. Valuation for company accounts is an example of not doing what is being paid for. When you look at the sort of properties that quoted propcos own, most is rubbish in the scheme of things yet somehow a resale market exists. From the discount between share price and last reported net asset value, it’s obvious that shareholders have no confidence in the valuations. Were it not for analogy, for reliance on comparable evidence passed off as valuation, the commercial property investment market would collapse.

( 2026-06-13 – LinkedIn views: 3,293. Supportive comments, including “Fabulous post”.)

(2026-May: Linked) Lawyers like certainty. Don’t we all? Certainly enables us to rely on it. For example, the weather forecast. This is not a certainty, it is a forecast yet many people rely on this scientific prediction as if it is certain it will rain tomorrow even when tomorrow arrives it is dry. My theory of the weather is that it listens to the weather forecast and decides that the best time to not do as it is told is during a bank holiday weekend. I am fond of telling friends that i have an arrangement with the weather. The arrangement is that sometimes the weather can let me down as, for example, happened a long time ago when with a friend we set off to walk the 7 miles around London’s Richmond Park, she with umbrella, me unprepared for an afternoon of rain.

Lawyers like certainty for its objectivity, so it is fascinating how many disputes at rent review involve a different interpretation. For example, In the wording of a permitted user, the innocuous ‘and’ – whether conjunctive or disjunctive?

Currently, I am reading about valuation yardsticks. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a yardstick provides certainty where none would or might otherwise exist. For example, the permitted use is a dental surgery, the valuation basis is offices. The fact if it is that the premises used as a dental surgery do not have and might never get planning permission for offices is irrelevant. The parties, most likely the landlord, wanted the premises to be valued as if offices. Sometimes the intention in being too specific goes awry as in Dukeminster (Ebbgate House One) Ltd v Somerfield Properties Co Ltd 1997.

For a landlord, hinging a rent review onto something other than the vagaries of the open market – in which the rent of the premises in question rely on the certainty at the review/valuation date of another landlord having obtained a higher rent for comparable premises – makes sense. During the 1970s, the institutional investor invention of the upward-only rent review recognised the downside of allowing the open market to be an arbiter. So now that it’s only a matter of time before upward-only review is banned, and forward-thinking has for the most part put a lid on index-linking, a solution, it seems to me, is to hinge a review to two figures: (1) a fixed increase at say 25% of the initial rent and (2) a fixed decrease at say 10% of the initial rent. With the initial rent known in advance, the tenant would know the maximum and minimum rents applicable at the review date and be able to negotiate between the known extremes.

(2025-May: LinkedIn) Auctions on-line: a worrying trend: taking more on trust than in the old days.

In the old days, not that long ago, auctions were held in rooms: a combination of prospective bidders physically present and telephone bidders. Part of an auctioneer’s job is to get the bidding started and continuing even if imaginary. The advantage of presence enabled others to see the bidding by bidders putting their hands up (or regular buyers a physical signal known to the auctioneer, such as a nod) With no need to register beforehand, impulse bidding possible. Auction fever common, buyers carried away by the excitement into overpaying. (When I lived in London, I sold my house, a thatched cottage, at auction: the auctioneer got the only bidder in the room to bid against herself up to the reserve price.) On the fall of the hammer an auction lot is sold subject to the buyer signing the auction memorandum (binding contract) and paying the deposit, normally 10%. An auctioneer’s assistant would get the buyer to do that straightaway. It was still possible for the buyer to do a runner immediately, but unusual. It was also possible for a buyer to fail to complete and lose the deposit, but at least the seller got 10%. Once upon a time, completion was 4 weeks. It became extended to enable buyers to get loans arranged.

Auctions on-line only have a different dynamic. A bidder has to be registered beforehand, usually the day before, (usually before 6pm – auctioneers go home early!). There may be other reasons for the seller withdrawing, but in any event no registered bidders means on the day of the auction the property is withdrawn.

At auction on-line, there are.only three ways to buy without being a registered bidder: prior to auction, after no sale at the auction, someone else registering as the bidder, be the winning bid to purposely jeopardise the sale, fail to sign the memo and pay a deposit, and hope to get it for less after the auction.

An auctioneer is authorised to sign the memorandum on behalf of both parties, but zero deposit. Although a memorandum is a binding contract, without a deposit, nothing for the seller to get without taking the buyer to court incurring the extra costs to begin with.

Auctioneers can blacklist time-wasters and do: Word gets round. But for credibility such buyers buy occasionally so difficult to prove. Sellers are none the wiser until after the event.

Selling prior is about judicious choice. Where the offer is above the reserve, and more than one offer prior, it doesn’t follow the highest is best choice. Allowing an accepted offer time to sign the auction contract and pay the deposit eats into the time remaining between acceptance and the auction. I have been a seller at auction twice. Once my own house, the second an executor not prior – In the room were several bidders and win completed. As an adviser to clients selling at auction, lots of times, including prior. Greed versus caution? After due diligence, gut-feeling best.

(2026-May: Linkedin) “I always find Michael’s comments welcome reminders of what a retained agent should be in terms of expertise, knowledge, application and common sense. Even in my world of media assets, possibly even more so, finding the right agent/expert is critical. Sadly, in my world it is often true that landlords are taking advice from agents/experts who actually know nothing or have relied upon hearsay and corrupted evidence. One such example was a City asset management team recounting and relying upon evidence supplied to a neighbouring City team as ‘evidence of the open market’ when that evidence was actually supplied by their tenant in negotiations.”

Posted on LinkedIn by Tim Thomas; Chartered Surveyor acting exclusively for landowners in the management of OOH and DOOH media assets since 1990.

(2026-May: LinkedIn) Ai? Third parties beware. Expert witnesses also.

Association des ressources intermédiaires d’hébergement du Québec (ARIHQ) c. Santé Québec (2026 QCCS 1360): “Arbitrator relied on non-existent legal authorities, strongly suggesting the use of generative AI.”

“In an unprecedented move, the Court annulled an arbitral award after finding that the sole arbitrator had implicitly delegated his decision-making authority to a generative AI tool, which resulted in the inclusion of “hallucinated” jurisprudence and legal doctrine.”

“When parties agree to arbitrate, they contract for a bespoke dispute resolution process wherein a specific human tribunal exercises independent intellectual judgment. The use of an unverified Large Language Model (LLM) to draft the award’s substantive reasoning is a structural deviation from this agreed procedure. Furthermore, feeding confidential submissions into a public AI tool violates the confidentiality and secrecy of deliberations inherent in arbitration.”

“The Court emphasized the intuitu personae nature of arbitration—the principle that an arbitrator is chosen for their personal expertise, judgment, and authority. Relying on an AI tool to formulate the substantive reasoning without verifying the output violated the fundamental maxim delegatus non potest delegare (a delegate cannot delegate) and breached the secrecy of deliberations.” “The Court, however, added a critical caveat: not every use of AI will automatically lead to annulment. If the AI usage is minimal, or if the hallucinated references do not form the crux of the reasoning, the award might survive if the breach did not fundamentally taint the proceedings.” [Source: Lexology 4 May 2026; Wasel & Wasel – Mahmoud Abuwasel]

It is well-known that where Ai doesn’t know the answer it makes things up to be helpful. Rather like a human being would/might.

In every expert witness report I write, I confirm that there is nothing in the report generated by or sourced from artificial intelligence, unless otherwise stated.

I call upon the RICS to make it a requirement for all chartered surveyor arbitrators and independent experts. and chartered surveyors acting as expert witness to include a similar confirmation.

(2026-May: LinkedIn) It is said that surveyors that specialise in rent review have a deeper understanding of business tenancy law than most. So using that knowledge for something other than rent review makes sense. Hence, I specialise in rent review and business tenancy advice.

“And business tenancy advice” is a wider field than just rent review. For example, service charges. I’m advising in a unusual dispute between two unrelated freeholders. A owns the property, B (for whom I am acting) has to pay a fair proportion of the cost of the services provided for the shared part of the A’s property. The dispute is about the value for money of work undertaken by contractors instructed by A’s managing agents.

I am advising the landlord on the apportionment for keeping the building and main structure wind and water tight. Researching case law for the meaning of ‘wind and water tight’ reminds many variations to the word ‘repair’. I found a case about a hedge between two fields and whose obligation to maintain the hedge where there is no documentary evidence: another ruling for my collection of might come in handy one day. From that collection something that has proved useful on numerous occasions is the word ‘condition’ as in “in good and substantial repair and condition” – more than mere repair.

Where a lease requires the landlord’s consent for alterations to be in writing, what happens at rent review, where a disregard is tenant’s improvements not in pursuance of an obligation to the landlord, if the tenant has altered the premises without any documentary consent and the landlord at the time has since deceased?

You might think these are the sort of questions best answered by a solicitor and/or barrister and often I think so too. The client knows they’ll get better value from me, my fees more reasonable. So where I know I can help I accept the instruction. On service charges, I have ample experience to act as expert witness, but don’t set out to attract instructions because service charge disputes are fiddly so for me the deciding factor whether to tackle the task is the client’s ability to pay regardless. As for how to calculate the proportion where the lease does not stipulate a percentage, Rateable Value proportion is problematic where part of the building is residential and RV inapplicable.

Second opinions – in the past two years I have advised on 4 single joint expert witness opinions by chartered surveyors. I wish I could say they were up to scratch but all fell short, three by a long way.

I had a go at Rateable Values and reduced some for a multiple retailer where the client’s regular surveyors hadn’t reduced as far as I did – I suggested to the client the reason being that the rating surveyors couldn’t be bothered to fight to the last because the extra fees weren’t worthwhile. But after the rules changed and overcoming the VOA’s deterrent became for me invincible without know-how, I gave approximately 25 instructions to specialist chartered surveyors.