Business Rates

Manage and mitigate your business rates

CBRE achieve cost savings and business certainty through proactive and intelligent rates mitigation advice. Whatever your business, our rating specialists operate as one nationwide team, collaborating with you to understand your business drivers, helping you understand and reduce your business rates liabilities. By working as your trusted business partner, we remove the administrative burden of the tax, deliver timely savings and leave you free to focus on your core business priorities.

Our approach is simple but successful. We leverage proprietary data and local market insights that our competitors simply don’t have. Our market facing teams ensures that we have access to key rental evidence, crucial to building the strongest case via the Check, Challenge and Appeal system. We then communicate your rating commitments with clarity. We also represent your interests by striving for legislative change at Government level.

Reducing Business Rates Tax liability fairly, allowing business to grow, is our ultimate driver.

Business Rates often needn’t be payable on empty property. CBRE have a specialist team specifically focussed on Empty Rates. Our experts will guide clients through this complex area of Rating, removing the administrative aspect and deploying strategies to maximise savings.

All of our specialist Empty Rates services are provided in-house, part of your one stop shop solution, with no third parties involved.

• Rates Management

  Our Rates Management service removes the administrative task of rate demand verification and payment across any portfolio. Our team are there to ensure that only the correct liabilities are paid, and any applicable reliefs and exemptions are applied.

• Deletion Appeals

  Where a property is subject to a programme of works, an appeal to delete the rating assessment may be appropriate. CBRE are experts in this field and have set legal precedent in court on behalf of our clients and the wider industry.

• Completion Notices

  Where these are received in respect of property subject to recent or ongoing works, they may result in premature assessment of the space. Our team have extensive experience in this niche area of rating and challenge these notices where appropriate. 

• Empty Rates Mitigation

  We offer a range of solutions to mitigate ongoing Empty Rates costs. Our in-house solution matches our own space requirements with our client’s vacant property. Alternatively, we are able to source charitable occupiers, short-term occupiers, or even long-term tenants through the wider CBRE business. 

• Rates Audit 

  Using proprietary CBRE technology, we are able to carry out a review of historic and current properties to ensure clients have been correctly charged for business rates. Where our system identifies an error, we recover those sums on the client’s behalf.

• Rateable Value Appeals

  We are experts in advising if there are grounds to challenge your rateable value and guide you through the complex appeal procedures introduced for the 2017 & 2023 rating list. Our access to CBRE's significant bank of rental data allows us to achieve market leading results for our clients.

Business rates are one of your biggest business expenses. CBRE’s dedicated team of sector specialists can help to manage and remove the administrative burden of dealing with Business Rates whilst maximising savings.

• Check, Challenge, and Appeal (England), Appeals (Scotland, NI and Wales)

  Advising if there are grounds to challenge your rateable value and guide you through the complex appeal procedures introduced for the 2017 & 2023 rating list.
• Empty Rates Mitigation
  We offer a range of solutions to mitigate ongoing Empty Rates costs. Our in-house solution matches our own space requirements with our client’s vacant property. Alternatively, we are able to source charitable occupiers, short-term occupiers, or even long-term tenants through the wider CBRE business. 
  
• Development, Completion Notices and Refurbishment Vacant Space 
  If you have vacated or redeveloped your property in part or in entirety, we will work to minimise or remove the rates liability.
  
• Disturbance Refunds
  If a nearby development is impacting your business, we can help you apply for rates relief and lodge appeals citing a material change of circumstances.
• Rates Management 
  We provide a full service for the payment and management of your rates for large or small portfolios together with all the necessary rating advice and supporting financial data and reporting.
• Forecasting for Budgets
  We can help you to budget by forecasting potential increases and possible refunds.
• Rates Audit
  Using proprietary CBRE technology, we carry out a review of historic and current properties to ensure clients have been correctly charged for business rates. Where our system identifies an error, we recover those sums on the client’s behalf.

Canary Wharf 

CBRE wins lead case for developers / investors in Upper Chamber Lands Tribunal saving client £4m

In preparation for securing a tenant on a vacant floor at 1 Canada Square, our client stripped back the space to shell and core. CBRE pursued an appeal against the Rating assessment on the basis that it was incapable of beneficial occupation and should be deleted.

The VOA disagreed with this approach and took the case to Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber), stating that the absence of a full scheme of works meant that the circumstances did not qualify for a deletion. The Upper Tribunal determined that CBRE’s appeal was correct and that the List entry should indeed be deleted.

Not only did our client receive a full refund of overpaid rates, but this decision has set an industry-wide precedent for the treatment of all future deletion appeals.