What to Sort Out Before You Sign Your First Warehouse Lease

You have shipped a campaign, tooling is paid for, and a container is on the water. Now you need somewhere to put 4,000 units that is not your kitchen. So you find 3,000 square feet in an industrial park at a rent that seems almost suspiciously reasonable, and you sign.

Six weeks later you learn three things. The camera covering the loading dock belongs to the landlord, and getting footage out of it requires an email to a property manager who answers in about four days. Your lease says you cannot drill into the demising walls without written consent. And your insurer, whose policy you bought after signing, wants an alarm certificate you cannot produce.

None of that is expensive to solve before you sign. All of it is expensive afterwards. Here is what to work out while you still have leverage, which is the period before your signature exists.

Walk the building at the wrong time of day

Every viewing is scheduled for a Tuesday at 11am, when the park is busy, the lighting is irrelevant because it is daylight, and everyone is at work. Go back on a Sunday afternoon and again after dark on a weekday.

You are looking for specific things. Whether the loading dock is visible from a road or tucked behind a blind corner. Whether the external lighting actually works or is just installed. How close a vehicle can get to your roller shutter. Whether the neighbouring units are occupied or empty, because an empty unit next door means nobody notices anything at night. Whether the park has a gate that is genuinely closed after hours or one that has been propped open so long the mechanism has rusted.

This half hour will tell you more than the entire brochure.

Find out who already has keys

Ask the landlord or agent directly: how many keys exist for this unit, and who holds them. The honest answer is usually some version of "we are not certain." Previous tenants, their contractors, the cleaning company, two brokers, a maintenance guy who left in 2023.

Rekeying a door is cheap. Discovering later that it needed doing is not. Budget for changing every external lock on day one and treat it as part of the move-in cost rather than a decision.

While you are asking, read the landlord's right of entry clause. Most commercial leases let the landlord and their agents in for inspections and repairs, sometimes with minimal notice. That is normal, and you should still know exactly what it permits before you decide where inventory sits.

Read the alterations clause before you plan any security

This is the one that catches everybody. Mounting cameras, running low-voltage cable through a ceiling, fitting a door controller, changing a lock cylinder, adding a cage in the corner: most leases treat these as alterations requiring the landlord's written consent, and many also require you to restore the space to its original condition when you leave.

Two things to negotiate now rather than later. First, pre-approval for a defined list of low-voltage work, so you are not writing consent requests when a container is already sitting on your forecourt. Second, an explicit right to leave cabling and mounts in place at the end of the term. Ripping out a fully cabled camera install and patching the walls is a genuinely unpleasant line item on your way out of a building.

If the space is multi-tenant, also establish what you are allowed to do in shared corridors and at shared entrances. Usually the answer is nothing, which changes your whole plan.

Get the insurance quote before you sign

Founders tend to treat insurance as a post-move admin task. It is actually a pricing input on the building itself.

Your premium and your excess depend on the construction, the location, the existing locks and shutters, whether there is a monitored alarm, and in some cases whether cameras cover specific areas. Insurers may also cap the stock value they will cover at a given address, which matters enormously when your entire crowdfunding fulfilment is sitting in one room.

Get an indicative quote for each building you are seriously considering, with your actual peak inventory value. Two units at the same rent can differ meaningfully once insurance is included, and occasionally the cheaper building is the more expensive one.

Ask specifically what the insurer requires rather than recommends. Requirements go in your fit-out budget. Recommendations are a conversation.

Check the upload speed, not the download speed

Industrial parks are frequently terrible for connectivity, and the brochure will quote a download figure because that is the number people ask about.

For anything that leaves the building, upload is the constraint, though not in the way most people assume. A cloud NVR does not push raw video off site around the clock. Footage records to an appliance on your own network, and clips plus metadata are what travel upward, which is precisely what lets a dozen cameras run on an ordinary business line. What you need is enough headroom to view remotely and export footage at the moment you need it, which is invariably the worst possible moment to discover you do not have it.

The failure mode to avoid is the opposite one: recording everything locally with nothing off site at all. Then your only copy of the footage sits in the same building as the inventory it was watching.

Find out what is genuinely available at that specific address, from providers, in writing, with an install lead time. Then design around that number instead of hoping.

Also find out where the incoming line enters the building and whether there is a lockable comms cupboard. If your network hardware and your recorder are going to live on a shelf in the open, that is worth knowing at the planning stage.

Establish who controls the dock

For hardware businesses, the loading dock is where almost everything goes wrong. Stock is most vulnerable in the twenty minutes it spends between a vehicle and a shelf, when the shutter is open, several people are moving, and nobody is watching a screen.

If the dock is shared, ask how scheduling works, who else has access, whether other tenants' drivers and couriers can walk through your area to reach theirs, and who is responsible if something goes missing from a shared space. Get the answer before you sign, because after you sign it becomes a dispute rather than a question.

What to actually spend on in month one

You do not need coverage of every square metre. You need coverage of the places where value changes hands.

In rough priority order: the dock and roller shutter, the pack bench, the entrance people actually use rather than the one on the floor plan, the inventory cage if you have one, and the cupboard holding your network kit and recorder. Everything else can wait for month six.

One budgeting note that surprises people: on a first install the cabling and labour usually cost more than the cameras. Cameras have got cheap. Running conduit through an industrial ceiling has not. This is exactly why the pre-signature conversation about alterations matters so much, because it determines whether you can do the cheap version or the expensive one.

For access, avoid a system built on physical keys you cannot audit. Anything that lets you switch off one person's credential the day they stop working for you will pay for itself the first time somebody leaves badly, and in a small team somebody eventually does.

Set retention by your claim cycle, not by the default

Most systems ship with a retention default that somebody picked arbitrarily. Choose yours based on how long it takes for a problem to reach you.

For a company shipping physical products, disputes arrive late. A customer says a box turned up empty. A retailer claims a pallet was short. A chargeback lands weeks after delivery. If your footage of the pack bench has already been overwritten by the time the claim arrives, you have a system that watched the incident and cannot help you.

Work backwards from your slowest realistic dispute and set retention past it. Storage is one of the few things in this process that is genuinely cheap.

The twenty minute version

Take this to your next viewing:

• Who holds keys, and how many exist

• What the alterations clause permits, and what restoration it demands

• Whether the landlord's cameras cover your dock, and how you request footage

• What your insurer requires at this specific address

• Actual available upload bandwidth, in writing

• Where the incoming line enters, and whether that space locks

• Who else can access a shared dock or corridor

• What the park looks like at 9pm on a Wednesday

None of this is glamorous and none of it will make your product better. It will, though, keep the entire physical output of two years of work from sitting in a building you do not really understand.