Commercial leasing advice for tenants and landlords

This service is commonly used by tenants taking on new premises, landlords issuing a draft lease, and parties dealing with renewals, variations or proposed assignments. It can be useful for retail, hospitality, office, warehouse and mixed-use commercial arrangements where the lease terms may affect day-to-day operations. Businesses often seek advice when the lease is longer term, the rent commitments are significant, or the document includes detailed obligations around repairs, outgoings, fit-out works or use restrictions.

The clauses that cause issues are often the ones people skim past when the deal first looks commercially acceptable. Common examples include rent review mechanisms, who pays outgoings, make-good obligations at the end of the term, repair and maintenance allocation, assignment or subletting restrictions, default rights and personal liability points. A lease can also look standard while still containing wording that limits flexibility if your business changes premises needs later. We review those clauses in the context of how the site will actually be used.

Yes. Part of the value in a lease review is identifying which clauses are worth negotiating and which issues are more about commercial preference than legal risk. For example, we may flag concerns around rent review drafting, landlord approval rights, reinstatement obligations, relocation clauses or broad indemnity wording. We can explain why those points matter and what follow-up questions to raise with the other side. If you later want us to become directly involved in extended negotiations, that would be arranged as additional work.

No. This service gives you legal advice on the lease and the issues raised by the proposed arrangement, but it is not an open-ended retainer for the entire property transaction. The listed fee covers the review and advice described on this page. It does not automatically include tax advice, ongoing correspondence with the other party, dispute work or continuing representation through every stage of negotiation and completion. If you need broader involvement, we can scope that separately once we know what level of support is required.

After the review, you will have a clearer picture of the main obligations, restrictions and negotiation points in the lease. From there, you might decide to sign, seek amendments, ask the landlord or tenant for clarification, or obtain further help on a revised draft. If the other side updates the lease in response to your comments, we can discuss whether a further review is needed. The service is intended to help you take the next step with better visibility on the legal position, rather than leave you with unexplained markup alone.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Commercial Leasing Lawyer service, pricing starts from $200.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.