Landlord and body corporate obligations for kitchen exhaust on the Sunshine Coast

The question nobody asks until it matters

A cafe in a leased shop gets a council inspection. The officer asks about the exhaust. The tenant says the landlord looks after the building. The landlord says the tenant looks after their own equipment. The duct above the ceiling has not been cleaned in six years, and both parties are now reading the lease for the first time.

This happens constantly, and it happens because the exhaust system crosses the line between the tenant's equipment and the landlord's building, and most leases do not say where that line is.

What leases usually say

Commercial leases on hospitality premises commonly include some combination of:

• A general maintenance clause requiring the tenant to keep the premises and the tenant's fixtures clean and in good repair.
• A specific exhaust clause requiring the tenant to have the exhaust system cleaned at a stated interval, sometimes with a requirement to provide the landlord with the reports.
• A make-good clause requiring the premises to be handed back in a stated condition, which often specifies the exhaust system.
• A compliance clause requiring the tenant to comply with all laws and standards applying to their use of the premises.

What they often do not say is where the tenant's system ends and the landlord's building begins, particularly for ductwork that runs through common areas or a roof shared with other tenancies.

The usual boundary

Where a lease is silent, the common-sense and commonly negotiated position is:

• Tenant: canopy, filters, and the duct within the tenant's demised area, up to the point it leaves.
• Landlord: the duct beyond that point, through common areas and roof space, and the fan, unless the fan serves only that tenancy and the lease allocates it to the tenant.
• Shared systems: landlord or centre management maintains the common parts and recovers the cost through outgoings.

The point is not that this allocation is correct in every case. It is that the allocation needs to be written down before an inspection, not argued about after one.

Why landlords should care regardless

Even where the lease puts the whole thing on the tenant, the landlord has skin in the game.

A duct fire damages the building, not just the tenancy. The landlord's insurer will ask about the exhaust at renewal and in any claim, and a landlord who cannot show that maintenance was required and monitored has a problem with their own insurer. In a mixed-use building, a duct running past apartments is a life safety issue the owner cannot delegate.

Practical steps for a landlord: write the interval and the reporting requirement into the lease, ask for the reports, and keep them. If the tenant does not produce them, that is a lease compliance issue to raise early.

Body corporate buildings

Where a food tenancy sits under a body corporate, ground floor commercial with residential above being the common Sunshine Coast case, the exhaust duct very often runs through common property to a fan on common property. That makes the shared sections a body corporate maintenance responsibility.

Many committees do not know this until something goes wrong, because the duct is invisible and nobody thought of it as common property. It is worth a committee identifying every exhaust duct passing through common property, establishing who maintains what, and getting the common sections onto a documented schedule with the cost recovered through levies or a commercial lot's outgoings.

A grease fire in a duct running past apartments is the scenario a body corporate most needs to prevent, and the one most likely to have no maintenance record at all.

Make-good

At the end of a lease, make-good clauses commonly require the exhaust system to be cleaned and certified before handback. This surfaces at exactly the moment a tenant least wants to spend money, and a landlord can withhold bond or pursue the cost if it is not done. A tenant who has kept reports throughout the lease is in a far better position at this point than one who has not.