Agentic UK commercial lease dilapidations negotiation service for SME tenants facing a landlord's Schedule of Dilapidations at lease end, replacing the building surveyor or solicitor who charges £1,500–£5,000 to review the schedule, challenge inflated claims, and negotiate a terminal settlement. Delivers a clause-by-clause rebuttal document, a counter-schedule with market-rate costings, and a negotiation position letter within 4 hours.
Why now
No live signal provided today; justified by the sustained volume of UK commercial property lease expiry activity and persistent r/legaladvice and r/smallbusiness threads on dilapidations disputes, plus the RICS Dilapidations Protocol (2012, updated guidance 2023) creating a structured process that an agentic system can follow. RICS guidance: https://www.rics.org/profession-standards/rics-standards-and-guidance/sector-standards/building-surveying/dilapidations-in-england-and-wales
Source signals
Commercial value
UK commercial tenants routinely face dilapidations claims of £10,000–£150,000 at lease end; even a modest claim makes a £500–£1,500 service fee an obvious ROI. Surveyors and solicitors currently bill £1,500–£5,000 for this work. ~80,000 UK commercial leases expire each year; even 1% penetration at £799/engagement = £640k ARR. Hospitality, retail, and office SMEs are the primary buyers — all have identifiable lease expiry dates.
Go-to-market
Target SME tenants 6–18 months before lease expiry via commercial property portals (Rightmove Commercial, CoStar), LinkedIn targeting of business owners in leased premises, and partnerships with commercial estate agents. Price: £799 flat fee per engagement. First 10 customers reachable by posting in r/legaladvice UK, UK business owner Facebook groups, and cold outreach to hospitality/retail operators with known lease end dates from Companies House filings.
2-week MVP
A PDF upload flow where the tenant uploads the landlord's Schedule of Dilapidations; an LLM pipeline extracts each item, cross-references against standard RICS cost guides (pasted in as reference data), and produces a Word document rebuttal with 'accept / challenge / negotiate' flags and suggested counter-values for each line item. No surveyor integrations, no automated negotiation — just the rebuttal document. First customer pays £299 to get a document that saves them £2,000+ in unchallenged claims.
Agent score
0.68 — Commercial score high — named budget line (surveyor/solicitor fee), clear ROI against claim size, identifiable trigger event (lease expiry). Speed slightly lower than pure form-to-PDF ideas because the LLM needs to reliably parse unstructured Schedule PDFs, which requires prompt engineering and testing — call it 3 weeks solo. Defensibility slightly above average because proprietary cost-guide data and a growing library of successfully challenged line items creates compounding accuracy advantage over time.
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