What is a work order?

A work order is the record of a single maintenance job: the location and asset, the fault, the assigned person or vendor, the priority and due date, the labour and parts used, and the final cost. It exists so work can be authorized, tracked and costed. At a leased site the record should also identify who is responsible for paying, because that is not always the party raising it.

Who pays for a repair at a leased store, the tenant or the landlord?

Whichever the lease says. Commercial leases allocate repair and maintenance by agreement, and a net lease can shift most of it to the tenant. A common pattern leaves the roof, exterior walls, foundation and plumbing with the landlord while assigning other systems to the tenant, but there is no default position and the clause governs. Some costs sit in a third category, recovered through CAM rather than paid directly by either party.

What is the difference between maintain and repair in a lease?

A duty to maintain generally covers routine upkeep, such as scheduled inspections and filter changes on an HVAC unit. A duty to repair covers fixing something that has failed, and a duty to replace goes further again. A tenant obliged only to maintain may not be responsible for a repair unless the lease expressly assigns it, so the verb used about each system, and any threshold attached, is what decides the answer.

Can a tenant withhold rent if the landlord will not make a repair?

Generally no. A tenant does not have the right to withhold rent payments even where the landlord has failed to comply with its repair obligations. The usual routes are to make the repair and seek reimbursement, or to sue for damages, and some leases add an express self-help and offset mechanism with its own notice and cure requirements. This varies by lease and jurisdiction, so take a live situation to counsel.

Should we still raise a work order for something the landlord owns?

Yes. Raise it, code it as a landlord obligation, and use it to trigger the notice the lease requires rather than a vendor dispatch. The ticket then becomes the record of when the condition arose, when notice was given and how the landlord responded, which is exactly the evidence a reimbursement claim or a renewal negotiation needs.

Back to blog

Work orders at leased sites: check the lease before you dispatch

September 27, 2026

Last updated: September 27, 2026

9 min read

Facilities and maintenance — Work orders at leased sites: check the lease before you dispatch

A work order is the record of a single maintenance job: the location and asset, the problem, the assigned person or vendor, the priority and due date, the labour and parts used, and the final cost. At an owned building that record is an operational document. At a leased site it is also a financial one, because the work it authorizes may not be the tenant's to pay for.

Most maintenance software treats dispatch as a routing problem: find the right vendor, hit the response time, close the job. For a leased portfolio there is a step in front of that, and skipping it is how occupiers spend money on their landlords' buildings.

The three questions before dispatch

Ask these in order, because the answer to each changes the next.

Where does the fault sit? Inside the demised premises, in a common area, or in a building system serving more than one tenant. The premises boundary in the lease decides this, not where the technician is standing.

Whose obligation is it? Commercial leases allocate repair and maintenance by agreement, and that allocation can be shifted substantially onto the tenant. As Berman Fink Van Horn put it, "in a commercial lease, the parties can agree to shift the obligation to repair and maintain the commercial property to the tenant," with a typical split having the landlord repair the roof, exterior walls, foundation and plumbing while the tenant handles other systems (Berman Fink Van Horn, Katherine M. Silverman, December 2020). There is no default. There is only your clause.

What does the lease require before you act? Many leases require written notice to the landlord, in a specified form and to a specified address, and give the landlord a period to respond before the tenant may do anything else. A phone call to the property manager is generally not the notice the lease means.

Maintain does not mean repair

This is the distinction that decides the most dispatches and causes the most leakage, and it turns on a single verb.

A clause requiring the tenant to "maintain" the HVAC system is not the same as one requiring the tenant to repair or replace it. Berman Fink Van Horn gives the example directly: under a duty to maintain, the tenant handles "routine inspections with a vendor and regularly changing the air filter," while repairs remain the landlord's duty unless expressly assigned. A tenant that reads maintain as a duty to keep the unit working forever will pay for a compressor it never agreed to buy.

So the operational rule is simple and almost nobody follows it. When a request comes in, do not ask what kind of asset it is. Ask what verb the lease used about that asset, and whether there is a threshold attached. Many leases qualify the allocation with a dollar figure, a component list, or a distinction between repair and replacement, and those qualifiers are where the real boundary sits.

Note that this is one firm's general commentary and the allocation is contract-specific and jurisdiction-specific. It illustrates the distinction rather than settling any particular lease.

The requests that come in, and the question each one raises

The table below is keyed to what the ticket actually says when it arrives, because that is the form the decision takes at eight in the morning. What governs is your lease, not this table.

A typical request	The question before dispatch	What usually settles it
HVAC not cooling	Is this maintenance or repair under our clause	Whether the lease says maintain, repair or replace, and any dollar or component threshold attached
Roof leaking over the sales floor	Is this the landlord's structural obligation, and have we given the notice the lease requires	The structural carve-out and the notice provision, including form and address
Parking lot lights out	Is this common area, and therefore a CAM cost rather than ours to fund directly	The premises boundary and the CAM definition
Plumbing backed up	Is the blockage inside the premises or in a shared line	Where the demising line falls and who owns the line beyond it
Storefront glass broken	Is this a repair, a casualty, or an insurance claim	The casualty and insurance clauses, and whose policy responds
Exterior sign not lit	Tenant equipment mounted on landlord structure	The sign rider and the alterations clause
Recurring pest issue	A service the tenant buys, or a building condition the landlord owes	Whether the lease assigns pest control to the tenant or treats it building-wide

Only after that question is answered does the work order get coded to a payer: tenant direct, landlord obligation, or common area cost recovered through CAM. That third category is the one occupiers watch least carefully, and it is real money they fund without controlling the scope or the procurement, which is the discipline in auditing pass-through charges.

What dispatching first actually costs

A tenant that sends its own vendor to fix a landlord obligation has usually done four things at once, and only the first was intended.

It has fixed the problem, which is why it happened. It has paid for work it did not owe. It has improved an asset it does not own and will hand back at expiry. And it has made recovery harder, because the landlord was never given the notice or the opportunity to perform that the lease contemplated, and the tenant now has to argue for reimbursement from a weaker position.

The temptation is obvious. A store is losing trade, the landlord's managing agent is slow, and a vendor can be there in two hours. Sometimes that is the right call, and most leases contemplate genuine emergencies. The point is that it should be a decision someone makes knowingly, with the lease in front of them, rather than the default behaviour of a dispatch queue.

At portfolio scale the pattern is what costs money rather than any single job. A few hundred sites, each making that call independently, produces a steady transfer of spend from landlords to the occupier that nobody has authorized and no report shows, because each work order looks reasonable on its own.

You cannot simply stop paying rent

Worth stating plainly, because it is the assumption people reach for when a landlord will not act.

A tenant does not generally have the right to withhold rent even where the landlord has failed to comply with its repair obligations. The routes available are to make the repairs and seek reimbursement from the landlord, or to sue for damages caused by the failure (Berman Fink Van Horn). Some leases add an express self-help and offset mechanism, with its own notice and cure requirements, and where that exists it has to be followed precisely to be relied on.

None of this is legal advice and the position varies by lease and by jurisdiction. The operational takeaway is narrower and safe: your position in these situations rests on having given proper notice and documented the landlord's failure to respond, which is a records discipline rather than a legal one. A live dispute belongs with counsel.

Making this work at portfolio scale

Nobody is going to read a lease at eight in the morning with a queue building. The check has to be in the system, not in someone's head.

That means the repair and maintenance allocation, the notice requirements and the premises boundary have to exist as structured data per site, not as a PDF someone could open in principle. Getting them there is lease abstraction work, and it is the thing that makes every downstream decision fast. Then the triage step routes on that data, so the person dispatching sees whose obligation it is before they choose a vendor, which is the point of connecting operations and resolution to lease terms rather than running it as a standalone queue.

Three things worth building in. Code every work order to a payer at creation, not at invoice, so the reporting exists. Track landlord-obligation tickets as an open register with notice dates, because that register is the recovery conversation. And review the pattern quarterly, because a site generating repeated landlord-obligation tickets is telling you something about the building that belongs in the renewal negotiation.

The lifecycle mechanics and where automation genuinely helps are covered in work order management software. Preventive scheduling, which reduces how often any of this comes up, sits in preventive maintenance. The capital-side view of the same building, where deferred work becomes a condition score rather than a ticket, is in the facility condition index. And the wider multi-site picture is in facility management for multi-site occupiers.

A work order is a small document. At a leased site it is also a decision about whose building you are improving.

FAQ

What is a work order?: A work order is the record of a single maintenance job: the location and asset, the fault, the assigned person or vendor, the priority and due date, the labour and parts used, and the final cost. It exists so work can be authorized, tracked and costed. At a leased site the record should also identify who is responsible for paying, because that is not always the party raising it.
Who pays for a repair at a leased store, the tenant or the landlord?: Whichever the lease says. Commercial leases allocate repair and maintenance by agreement, and a net lease can shift most of it to the tenant. A common pattern leaves the roof, exterior walls, foundation and plumbing with the landlord while assigning other systems to the tenant, but there is no default position and the clause governs. Some costs sit in a third category, recovered through CAM rather than paid directly by either party.
What is the difference between maintain and repair in a lease?: A duty to maintain generally covers routine upkeep, such as scheduled inspections and filter changes on an HVAC unit. A duty to repair covers fixing something that has failed, and a duty to replace goes further again. A tenant obliged only to maintain may not be responsible for a repair unless the lease expressly assigns it, so the verb used about each system, and any threshold attached, is what decides the answer.
Can a tenant withhold rent if the landlord will not make a repair?: Generally no. A tenant does not have the right to withhold rent payments even where the landlord has failed to comply with its repair obligations. The usual routes are to make the repair and seek reimbursement, or to sue for damages, and some leases add an express self-help and offset mechanism with its own notice and cure requirements. This varies by lease and jurisdiction, so take a live situation to counsel.
Should we still raise a work order for something the landlord owns?: Yes. Raise it, code it as a landlord obligation, and use it to trigger the notice the lease requires rather than a vendor dispatch. The ticket then becomes the record of when the condition arose, when notice was given and how the landlord responded, which is exactly the evidence a reimbursement claim or a renewal negotiation needs.