A ground floor shop with a mezzanine on a main road in Machchangolhi, eleven hundred square feet in total, vacant for five months when we were instructed.
It had been empty because of the advance. The landlord was asking six months in advance plus two months deposit on a rent of 34,000, which is a quarter of a million rufiyaa of cash before a single shelf goes in. Plenty of businesses that could comfortably pay the rent cannot find that, and the landlord had been reading the silence as the rent being too high. It was not the rent.
We let it at 34,000 with four months in advance and one month deposit, to a household goods retailer who wanted the mezzanine for stock. What made the difference on the landlord's side was that we put a figure on the vacancy: five months empty had already cost him 170,000 rufiyaa, and the two months of advance he gave up was 68,000 of cash flow, not of income.
The negotiation then moved to the two clauses that matter on a shop. The fit out period was agreed at six weeks with no rent, on the condition that the work was to a drawing the landlord had seen, which protected him from a mezzanine being loaded beyond what it was built for. And the ending was written down properly: the tenant hands back the shell, keeps their own fittings, and the shopfront sign comes down at their cost. Vague on both counts is how a commercial letting ends in an argument about a hundred thousand rufiyaa five years later.
A three year term with a review at the end of year two, tied to a written method rather than to a number somebody would pick later.
Open now, still there, rent paid on the first of the month by transfer.