Recovering commercial rent in Peterborough
Peterborough sits on the A1 and the East Coast Main Line, and a great deal of its commercial property is distribution and warehousing at Fengate and Orton rather than city centre retail. The units are large, so arrears build into five figures faster than they do elsewhere.
We act for landlords, managing agents and surveyors across Cambridgeshire and the East of England, most often in the city centre and Cathedral Square, Fengate, Orton Southgate and Lynch Wood and the surrounding commercial areas. The procedure is the same wherever the property is, but what actually works on the ground is not, and it is worth understanding the difference before instructing anybody.
Where the work is
Peterborough is weighted heavily towards distribution and light industrial: Fengate, Orton Southgate, Newark Road and the Eastern Industry estates, with the business-park stock at Lynch Wood alongside. Retail and hospitality arrears come from the Queensgate surrounds and the city-centre parades.
Distribution property is a reasonably strong position for taking control of goods, because units hold stock and handling equipment. The caution is the same one that applies everywhere in logistics: a great deal of what sits on a distribution floor belongs to a customer, a financier or a supplier under retention of title, and none of that can be taken.
What tends to matter locally
A distribution warehouse holds other people's goods almost by definition. Stock in transit belongs to the customers who sent it, not to the tenant, and on these sites the first job is separating what the tenant actually owns from what is simply sitting there.
How quickly we can be there
We aim to be with you within two hours, though being straight about it, that is rarely what decides the outcome: the compliance stage runs from the office, and the tenant first gets a written Notice of Enforcement with fourteen clear days to run before anybody attends. Most commercial arrears are settled inside that period without an attendance at all.
Peterborough is a planned attendance and we establish what the tenant actually owns before making it, rather than arriving to find the floor stacked with somebody else’s pallets.
The statutory fees
Under the Taking Control of Goods (Fees) Regulations 2014 the fees are fixed by statute: a £79 compliance fee when the Notice of Enforcement is issued, and a further £247 plus 7.5% of anything above £1,900 if an enforcement visit becomes necessary, with the full statutory scale set out in full separately.
Those figures are fixed by regulation, not by us, and they are the same in Peterborough as anywhere else in England and Wales.
Before you instruct us
Two things decide whether CRAR can be used at all:
- The lease must be a commercial one, in writing, with no part of the property let as a dwelling.
- At least seven days' rent must be outstanding, net of VAT, interest and any deduction the tenant could properly claim, which is the statutory minimum under section 77(3) of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007.
If both hold, we can usually have a Notice of Enforcement out the same working day we are instructed.