We set out below the top 10 mistakes which we see (quite regularly) when clients ‘go it alone’ on breaks.

1. Never DIY! We would say this, wouldn’t we! True but the majority of problems which we see (whether acting for tenants or landlords) are when clients DIY. We understand why clients do this – it seems simple enough and it saves costs. You have AI to assist you now. Resist the temptation. We can honestly say that DIY notices/breaks are rarely (if ever) completely correct. We give some common examples below. But the simple answer is to instruct a specialist property litigator to serve a lease break notice and advise on compliance. The cost of getting the notice done properly and proper advice is marginal as compared with the value of the ongoing liability if the notice is wrong.
2. Approach and planning: Many of the mistakes we see could be described as mistakes of approach and planning. The most obvious would be not diarizing the break, not thinking about break conditions and not approaching the break with the correct mindset. There are two key points here. First, landlords don’t like ‘breaks’ for obvious reasons and most landlords will insist on strict compliance with break conditions. In other words, this is a situation where mistakes won’t be ‘waived’ and the other side won’t be ‘reasonable’, ‘fair’ or ‘commercial’. They will be legalistic and take any point available. The aim is therefore not to give the landlord any room for debate. Secondly, there are always strict legal conditions when exercising a break. This requires careful planning and implementation – we always say: “with military precision”! The ideal is when clients come to us 6 or 12 months before a break clause needs to be served and we can advise and plan from that point forwards. This allows us to advise on what needs to be done to get the break – i.e., serving the notice and complying with all conditions. We can identify the ‘banana skins’ well in advance and guide the client to a successful break. But, even if it’s a few days before the deadline for serving a break notice, we can still assist and try to ensure the notice is done properly.
3. Serving notice by email. How often do you send a letter these days? Probably never. All business communications are by email nowadays. So, surely you can give notice by email. Unfortunately, not. It sounds mad to say this in 2026 but emails generally don’t suffice as notices need to be ‘in writing’ and sent to a specific address.
4. Serving notice on the wrong person. How would you identify the correct recipient? Simple - you send the notice to the person you normally deal with on rent and other issues. This is the most common mistake we see. You probably deal with an agent and agents are rarely instructed to accept service of notices. OK – so who should you serve on? What about the name on the lease? Well – not if the landlord has changed since the lease was granted? What about checking the Land Registry title which we have on file? Helpful up to a point but not if it’s not up to date. What about name changes? The bottom line is you need to know the legal rules to identify the correct recipient. These rules are complex – it isn’t just a matter of common sense; it’s about expertise and experience.
5. Serving notice on the wrong address and/or by the wrong method: It’s the same point. There are many seemingly sensible possible addresses one could use – the address on an email from the landlord, the address on the last rent demand, the address in the lease, the address at Land Registry and so on. One of these addresses might be fine or none of them might be fine. It’s about knowing where to serve and how to serve. We do.
6. Serving notices late: Same point again. How do you work out the date by which you need to serve the notice and what date to put in the notice? Common sense will take you so far and you might even get close (if not right). But we see the lots of notices served a day late or with the break date out by one day. Normally fatal. Again, the rules are complex. If it’s any consolation, one of the best-known cases on break clauses was about a law firm which put the wrong break date in its own notice. It’s easy to do.
7. Serving the notice and then forgetting about the other break conditions: We see this a lot! It’s an easy mistake because there’s normally 6 to 12 months between serving the notice and the break. Maybe there’s a change of personnel at the client or someone passes on responsibility for the break to a new person. Maybe no one person has clear responsibility for the break. Maybe the client just didn’t realise that there were other conditions to be complied with. Whatever the reason, the best approach is the two-step approach: (a) get advice early so you know exactly what is required to get the break and (b) implement a plan/process to ensure compliance (usually involving monitoring at board or senior level). A simple failsafe is to diarize a series of calls with your professional team (usually lawyers and surveyors) to monitor progress and compliance. This allows problems to be identified early and managed. And what do we mean by ‘problems’? We mean complying with the break conditions set out in the lease. Nowadays the conditions are normally limited to payments and ‘getting out by the break date’ (see below).  But this isn’t always the case and the break clause wording needs to be analysed carefully. Older leases often have much more onerous conditions such as the infamous ‘compliance with all tenant obligations under this lease’. If you have one of those, you will get to know your property lawyers very well as you will need a lot of assistance. Please call us as we have guided clients through this on many occasions.
8. Failure to comply with financial break conditions: Breaks are always conditional on payments. The difficult questions are what payments and by when? These vary considerably (e.g., principal rent, all rents, insurance, service charge, interest, break premiums and so on). This area is too complex to summarize here. The best example to flag the point is the infamous case where a tenant lost a break for failing to pay £130 of interest on late paid rent which the landlord had never demanded. A bonkers case on any view but that’s the law. The answer is – you need to know the rules. It’s not common sense; it’s expertise and experience.
9. Failure to vacate, give back possession etc…: The most common other condition is giving back the property, which again comes in many different flavours and with different requirements. Again, there is too much detail to set this out here. We flag two key points here. First, there are normally two elements to consider here: vacating de facto and vacating in law. Complying with both elements is critical and normally requires advance planning and guidance from your lawyers and surveyors. There can be tricky issues here – especially around what has to be removed the property and third-party interests. Secondly, timing is critical here (i.e., doing what needs to be done by the break date). A common mistake is for a tenant’s contractor to stay in after the break date whilst finishing off dilapidations work. That is always fatal. It’s also often because the tenant isn’t clear about how the break and dilapidations fit together. All of this can be avoided with proper advice.
10. Failure to get advice quickly if things go wrong: We commonly get approached by clients who have made a mistake and tried to put things right (e.g., serving additional notices when told that their first notice was wrong). Mistakes are hard to admit and harder to grapple with. This is one area when a problem shared is a problem halved. We can’t always put things right but we often can. Not all mistakes (e.g., typographical errors) are fatal to a notice. Maybe the landlord is trying it on and we can push back. We have done that in the past. We can invariably try to mitigate the position. If there’s still time, we can serve a valid notice. If there’s a rolling break, we can serve a new notice which will comply at a later date. At the very least, we can give you frank advice and tell you what the score is so you can plan going forward.

Hopefully, the above points are helpful and explain why it’s important to get advice and why the expense of getting advice is worth it in the long run.

For more information on breaks, please see our tenant guide available to download below.