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The end of upward-only rent reviews signals a data-driven future for retail leasing

Kinexio

24 June,2026

1 min read

Upward-only rent reviews remain legally enforceable today. But the 2026 Act has already settled their fate. The mechanism still operates, the ban itself awaits secondary legislation and is unlikely to take effect before 2027, yet the direction of travel is no longer in question. UORRs are now a legacy structure, and the market knows it.

It is worth being clear about the scope of this. This is not a retail-only story. The reform reaches across Retail, Office and Industrial leasing in England and Wales, and it amounts to a reset of how commercial property income is structured, not a tweak to one sector’s lease terms.

For decades, UORRs underpinned the institutional investment model that built the UK retail property market. They gave landlords predictability, supported asset valuations, and allowed income to be treated as something close to a known quantity. That certainty is now being withdrawn, and with it goes a great deal more than a single clause in a lease.

From contractual certainty to performance-based income

UORRs created a deliberately asymmetric risk model. Rent could rise with the market, but it could not fall with it, leaving landlords protected from downside and tenants absorbing the full volatility of trading conditions. Take that mechanism away, and the rationale for fixed, one-directional rent starts to weaken.

In its place, turnover-linked structures are gaining ground quickly, whether as pure turnover rent or hybrid arrangements that pair a base rent with a performance-related top-up. Once income is genuinely able to move in both directions, tying rent to actual trading performance stops being a point of differentiation and starts to look like the sensible default.

This is a move from contract-led income to performance-led income, and it carries consequences well beyond the leasing team.

Turnover rent is not new — but scaling it is

Turnover rent is sometimes described as a recent innovation. It isn’t. The model has existed for decades and is well established in leisure and hospitality, where trading performance has long driven rental income.

What has changed is the scale at which the industry is now expected to run it. Turnover rent used to work because it was applied selectively, to particular occupiers or particular asset types. The prospect now is far more systemic, with entire portfolios moving toward income that is directly linked to occupier performance. The industry has talked about turnover rent for years. It has not, in the main, built the infrastructure needed to manage it at scale.

The hidden operational challenge

On paper, turnover rent looks simple: a percentage of sales. In practice, it requires sales data that is collected consistently across a tenant base, verified and reconciled, interpreted correctly against lease terms that rarely match one another, and read in the context of wider asset and market performance.

Much of this work is still done manually. Data arrives in different formats and on different timetables, reconciliation is slow, and disputes over the numbers are far from rare. As turnover-based income becomes more widespread, a tension emerges: income is becoming more dynamic while the systems used to manage it stay largely static. Without the right data infrastructure behind it, the likely outcome is more administrative burden, less transparency, and weaker performance from the asset itself.

TDat becomes the new rent review mechanism

Under UORRs, rent reviews were periodic and contractual, fixed points in time governed by lease clauses. Under a turnover model, rent is effectively being reviewed continuously, driven by live trading figures rather than a calendar date.

That changes where the real work sits. The centre of gravity moves from lease clauses to data flows. Landlords need reliable, timely access to sales data, a clear understanding of how their lease structures translate that data into income, the ability to benchmark performance across assets and occupiers, and a realistic basis for forecasting income in a market that no longer holds still. Data stops being a reporting exercise after the fact and becomes part of how the asset is actually run.

A new basis for negotiation

This shift extends into how leases are negotiated, not just how they are administered. Negotiations have traditionally rested on headline rents, comparable evidence and general market positioning. In a performance-led environment, real trading data sits alongside those factors, and in some cases overtakes them.

Tenants are increasingly bringing their own performance figures to the table to challenge rental assumptions. Landlords need an equivalent, portfolio-wide view of trading if they are to negotiate from a position of confidence rather than guesswork. The outcome of this is not a simple transfer of power from one side to the other. It favours whichever party turns up with the more credible data. Insight, in effect, becomes leverage.

From lease management to lease intelligence

The role of lease data itself needs to change too. It has traditionally been treated as a static record, important but largely administrative, sitting in the background once a deal is signed. That is no longer good enough.

Lease terms now determine how income is calculated in real time. Differences in turnover thresholds, caps, exclusions or reporting frequency can have a material effect on revenue, not a marginal one. Lease data therefore needs to be structured, accessible, integrated with performance data and genuinely used in day-to-day decisions, rather than filed away once the deal completes. What was once a back-office record becomes a live commercial input.

The infrastructure gap and the opportunity

Taken together, this points to a clear conclusion: moving away from upward-only rent reviews is as much a data challenge as it is a leasing one. Operating effectively in this environment requires automated and reliable sales collection, properly structured lease intelligence, real-time performance analytics, and the ability to bring all three together in one coherent view.

These capabilities are quickly moving from desirable to essential, for income visibility, for operational efficiency, and for negotiating strength alike.

Defining the next generation of retail leasing

Much of the public debate on upward-only rent reviews focuses on fairness, flexibility or modernisation. Those are valid points, but they sit on the surface of a deeper change. The shift to turnover-based leasing alters not just how rent is set, but how retail property is understood and managed day to day. It calls for a move from static, contract-driven thinking toward dynamic, data-led decision-making.

The question is no longer whether this transition happens. It is already under way. The more pressing question is whether landlords have the data capability to operate profitably once it does. Those who invest in the right infrastructure now will be in a position to shape the market that follows. Those who wait risk losing more than efficiency. They risk losing visibility, control, and ultimately value.

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