Office dilapidations in London, priced line by line against the schedule.

London office dilapidations by 2VP: schedules of dilapidations priced line by line after a measured site survey, strip-out and reinstatement back to the landlord’s finish, delivered under one JCT contract to a completion date set by your lease end.

Your surveyor decides what is owed. We price what it costs.

Two different jobs, and they should not sit with the same company. Testing a schedule against the lease, against the statutory limits and against what the landlord actually intends to do with the space is building surveying, and your surveyor acts for you in doing it. We are the contractor.

What we add is the number underneath each line. A schedule is priced on the landlord’s assumptions; until someone prices it on the work, nobody in the negotiation knows what any disputed item is really worth. We give your surveyor that figure, item by item, against the schedule’s own numbering.

Be wary of a contractor who offers to negotiate the schedule for you. The person pricing the work should not also be the person deciding how much of it is owed.

What the lease decided years before the schedule arrived

Almost everything in a schedule of dilapidations was settled on the day the lease was signed — by the repair clause, by the reinstatement clause, and by whether anyone took a schedule of condition before you moved in. By the time the document lands, those decisions are history.

The repair clause governs the condition of what was already there. The reinstatement clause governs whether the partitions, cabling and tea-point you installed have to come out again — which is the clause that decides whether a fit-out gets paid for twice. They are different obligations and they are frequently confused.

We have written the law up separately rather than summarising it here: the statutory ceiling on a repair claim, the proviso that can extinguish it where a landlord is redeveloping, and the four things worth settling before you sign a lease are all in our guide to what you agree to hand back. Read it before you accept a figure.

What a strip-out back to the landlord's finish actually involves

The exact scope is whatever your reinstatement clause and the schedule between them require, which is why the survey reads both before anything is priced. In practice it is most of this list:

• Partitions, glazed screens and doors removed, and the openings made good
• Floor finishes lifted, raised floor levelled and tiles replaced where damaged
• Data and power cabling pulled back, containment removed, circuits made safe
• Tea-points, showers and any added sanitary fittings out, services capped
• Ceiling grid, tiles, lighting and sprinkler heads returned to the base-build pattern
• Mechanical services put back to the original zoning where the layout moved them
• Full redecoration, and the schedule’s repair items carried out alongside

Waste goes out under a duty-of-care chain with transfer notes, because a landlord’s surveyor can and does ask for them at handover.

The lease end is fixed, so the programme runs backwards from it

This is the part that costs tenants money quietly. Holding over past the lease end, or leaving the landlord to carry out the works at their own pace and bill you, is routinely dearer than the works. The programme therefore starts at your lease end date and works backwards, and the first question at survey is whether the remaining time is enough.

We finish on the agreed date, or we pay you £500 for every week we are late. On a lease end that matters more than it does anywhere else we work.

If the time left is genuinely too short to do it properly, we will say so at the survey rather than after you have signed. That is a cheaper conversation in September than in December.

London districts we work in most

• Marylebone · W1 — City of Westminster
• Fitzrovia · W1 — City of Westminster and LB Camden
• The City · EC2 — City of London Corporation
• Clerkenwell · EC1 — LB Islington
• Hammersmith · W6 — LB Hammersmith & Fulham
• Fulham · SW6 — LB Hammersmith & Fulham
• Chiswick · W4 — LB Hounslow
• White City · W12 — LB Hammersmith & Fulham
• Nine Elms & Battersea · SW8 · SW11 — LB Wandsworth
• Kensington & Chelsea · SW3 · W8 — RB Kensington & Chelsea

How it is priced, and when you pay

Priced after a measured site survey, never from a floor area over the phone. The survey is £550 and is credited in full against the works if you proceed. What comes back is an itemised quotation within 48 hours of that visit, set against the schedule’s own line numbering so your surveyor can read the two side by side.

10% to mobilise, then weekly against work already done — with 5% held past handover: 2.5% released at practical completion and 2.5% at the end of the 12-month defects period.

Prices are quoted as a band, because a contract plus variations is what this work actually is — and the band narrows as the scope is pinned down. Every contract carries a 12-month workmanship warranty on second-fix fittings, backed by 2VP and signed by the trades who did the work.

A real studio, in Fulham.

One company, one address, one registered number — not a lead form that sells your details on. You can walk into the office on Dawes Road and ask for Vladimir by name.

Office dilapidations in London — common questions

Send us the schedule.

We will walk the floor against it and come back with a price per line within 48 hours of the visit — early enough for your surveyor to use it.