Lease wording- to sublet or not to sublet?

Heva

Hi, can someone interpret the following please?

"Not to assign transfer sublet or part with possession of part only of the demised premises"

Does this mean I cannot rent my flat?

DVardysShadow

No, it means not to divide the demised premises.

Yorkie1

I read it the opposite way, in that the first 3 related to the entire property and you not living there, and the final section related to dividing off part of it whilst living in the rest of it.

So my answer would have been that you can't rent it out. But happy to defer to the general consensus.

DVardysShadow

Yorkie1 wrote: »

I read it the opposite way, in that the first 3 related to the entire property and you not living there, and the final section related to dividing off part of it whilst living in the rest of it.

So my answer would have been that you can't rent it out. But happy to defer to the general consensus.

Time to bring out the brackets

1. Not to [ [assign transfer sublet or part with] possession of part only of the demised premises ]
2. Not to [ [assign transfer sublet] or [part with possession of part only of the demised premises] ]

I am with 1, you are with 2. But the problem with 2 is that there is no subject for the verbs I]assign transfer sublet[/I. So if we decided that it was OK after all to part with possession of part only of the demised premises and took that bit out, we would end up with

• Not to [ [assign transfer sublet] ]

which does not make sense without a subject

There is yet another way of bracketing

• Not to [ [assign transfer sublet] or [part with possession of part only of] the demised premises ]

So if you decided that it was OK after all to part with possession of part only of and took that bit out, you would end up with

• Not to [ [assign transfer sublet] the demised premises ]

which makes sense semantically, but would be a prohibition on sale, gift or inheritance. Assuming OP owns [has a saleable lease on] his flat, this would not make practical sense.

thegirlintheattic

Can we have some punctuation please? I read it as Yorkie did. Also are you sure it is of not or before part.

Typed before the above post. OP what was the punctuation on the lease?

DVardysShadow

thegirlintheattic wrote: »

OP what was the punctuation on the lease?

Often, legal documents do not have punctuation on the entirely true basis that punctuated text can be ambiguous. Unfortunately, this shows that false logic can be based entirely on true statements, because, as the example shows, unpunctuated text can also be ambiguous. In order to extract the sense out of the text, I have had to analyse it syntactically, semantically and practically in its application domain.

jamie11

OP, it simply means that if you are going to rent it out to someone then you have to rent the whole property, not a part of it.

My word there must be an epidemic of pedanticism tonight.

thegirlintheattic

DVardysShadow wrote: »

Often, legal documents do not have punctuation on the entirely true basis that punctuated text can be ambiguous. Unfortunately, this shows that false logic can be based entirely on true statements, because, as the example shows, unpunctuated text can also be ambiguous. In order to extract the sense out of the text, I have had to analyse it syntactically, semantically and practically in its application domain.

In that case I bow to your knowledge, my experience comes from AST documents which thankfully have punctuation. Makes it much less confusing to read!

Heva

Thanks for all of your comments, I have quoted from the lease exactly, and it states the phrase without punctuation.

So my property is a ground floor flat, am i correct then in thinking your interpretations are that I can sublet, I just can't seperate the flat for subletting puposes? I can only sublet the whole flat?

DVardysShadow

Heva wrote: »

Thanks for all of your comments, I have quoted from the lease exactly, and it states the phrase without punctuation.

So my property is a ground floor flat, am i correct then in thinking your interpretations are that I can sublet, I just can't seperate the flat for subletting puposes? I can only sublet the whole flat?

Yes, that would be my take on it.

moromir

NB

It might not be just 'the flat' that you can't divide up, does the flat come with a garage, outdoor cupboard, allocated parking space etc? If any of these fall within the 'demised premises' (and you'll need to read the lease, theres no 'usual' answer) you must rent the flat with these facilities included.