Soft Strips and Make-Good: What Commercial Tenants Get Wrong

End-of-lease make-good is the most argued-about work in commercial property, and the argument is nearly always about scope rather than workmanship.

Read the lease first, not the last week

Your make-good obligation is defined in your lease, and it varies enormously. Some require the premises returned to base building — everything the tenant installed removed, services capped, floors and ceilings back to shell. Others require only that the premises be left clean and in good repair, with the fit-out staying put.

Those are wildly different jobs at wildly different prices, and the difference is a clause, not an opinion.

Get the lease to your contractor. A quote priced against the actual obligation is defensible when the landlord's agent walks through. A quote priced against a guess is the start of a negotiation you will lose.

What a soft strip usually covers

Partitions and glazed office fronts. Ceiling grid and tiles. Lighting and the wiring behind it. Data cabling — including the cable in the ceiling that everyone forgets. Mechanical services added by the tenant. Floor coverings and adhesive. Joinery, kitchens and amenities. Signage, including the fixing holes and the patching afterwards.

Then the make-good itself: patching, capping services correctly, and leaving the base building in the condition the lease describes.

The building is the constraint, not the scope

Commercial strip-outs are rarely difficult work. They are logistically constrained work.

- **Access hours.** Most buildings will not allow noisy work during trading hours. Night and weekend shifts are normal. - **The goods lift.** Booked, shared and slower than anyone plans for. Lift capacity often determines the program more than the volume of material does. - **The loading dock.** Shared with other tenants, with a booking sheet and a time limit. - **Inductions and permits.** Site induction, hot-work permits, isolation permits for services, and the building manager's own conditions. - **Other tenants.** Trading either side of your wall, and complaining to the same building manager who controls your access.

The contractor who asks about all of this before quoting is the one whose program will hold.

Waste staging

Material cannot sit in a corridor waiting for a lift. In a live building the waste plan matters as much as the strip: what comes out in what order, where it is staged, when the lift is booked, and when the truck arrives. Get that wrong and you spend a shift moving the same material twice.

Do the walk-through with the agent early

The most useful thing a departing tenant can do is get the landlord's agent on site early, with the contractor present, and agree the scope in writing before work starts. It converts a subjective judgement made under time pressure at handover into an agreed list.

It is not a difficult conversation to have three months out. It is a very difficult one to have on the last day of the lease.