Commercial Rent Arrears Recovery (CRAR).

CRAR applies where four conditions are met: your lease is in writing, the premises are wholly commercial with no residential element, the arrears are principal rent rather than service charges or insurance, and at least seven days’ net rent is unpaid. We check all four before accepting an instruction, so you don’t pay for an enforcement route that can’t legally run.

CRAR is limited by statute to principal rent, together with any interest and VAT due on it. Service charges, insurance contributions and business rates fall outside it, even where your lease reserves them as rent. We recover those through our commercial debt recovery service instead, and where arrears include both, we run CRAR and commercial debt recovery in parallel rather than one after the other.

Not through CRAR. The right depends on a lease evidenced in writing, so a verbal or implied tenancy rules it out regardless of how clear the arrears are. The debt itself doesn’t disappear – we pursue it through our commercial debt recovery service.

To open a CRAR instruction we’ll need a copy of your account statement showing the arrears, copies of the outstanding invoices, a copy of the lease, and our instruction form completed – available on our website. Once we have these, we can run the eligibility check and get started without further back-and-forth.

Once we receive a complete instruction, we serve the Notice of Enforcement the same day if it’s in by 3pm. The statutory notice period is 14 days, and our agent typically attends the day after that period expires. Where the case doesn’t move to a payment plan, most landlords see funds in their account within around 15 days of instructing us.

It depends on whether you want to keep the tenant. CRAR recovers the money and affirms the lease – using it waives your right to forfeit for those same arrears. Forfeiture ends the tenancy and returns the premises to you, but you lose the income and the arrears become harder to recover. You can’t do both for the same rent, so the decision needs making before either starts. We weigh each case individually – the tenant’s credit standing and financial position, the type and location of the unit, and how often they’ve fallen into arrears before – rather than applying a single fixed rule.

Ceased trading or no goods worth taking doesn’t mean we walk away. Our focus is always on getting you paid rather than on the goods themselves – the presence of a certificated agent at the premises, and the real prospect of goods being taken, is often enough on its own to bring a tenant to the table and settle the debt.

Yes to both. Every agent who attends is a certificated enforcement agent, certificated by the County Court as the law requires. Our Authorised High Court Enforcement Officer, Andrew McDermott, is in-house rather than subcontracted – he joined Strikes in Spring 2025 and has been an authorised HCEO since 2023. The officer accountable for your instruction is someone you can speak to directly.

We cover England and Wales in full, with agents attending nationwide. CRAR is a statutory remedy under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, which doesn’t extend to Scotland or Northern Ireland – so if your property sits outside England and Wales a different process applies, and we’ll tell you at the eligibility check.