Legal assistance with rental agreements

Questioner

A few weeks ago we had a conversation with a cash and carry centre to rent a space to sell our products. After the conversation we told my conversation partner (the owner of the cash and carry centre) that we would discuss a few things and that we would like to receive an overview of the costs. The gentleman sent me this overview in an e-mail (not a pdf file or another attachment, but written down in an e-mail). After this I sent him an e-mail to agree. The gentleman then sent me the rental agreement and the general terms and conditions. Due to a terminal patient in the family we unfortunately have not yet been able to read and return the forms. After reading the forms for a while, we have decided not to make use of his offer for the time being. After this we received the previous e-mail: In your e-mail you indicated that you wish to refrain from participating in ... According to the email exchange below from June last year, you entered into a rental agreement with the... Failure to return a signed copy does not change this agreement. Since you are talking about temporarily refraining from participating, if you want a different start date, you can make us a proposal. Otherwise we will assume that you will simply start on September 1. Our question is: are we obliged to sign this lease and send it to this company? Or is this a way of manipulating us to enter into a lease with this company?

Lawyer

An agreement is initially created by offer and acceptance. In this case, the offer concerned at least the rent. You accepted this offer. Not entirely clear, but reading between the lines, it seems that the start date had already been discussed, and there was agreement. The landlord can hold you to this acceptance and agreement. However, there will also be a number of matters that have not yet been discussed that were only addressed in the written documents. No agreement has therefore been reached on these matters, which means that provisions from the law that discuss (business) rent will have to be reverted to. In this situation it might be more useful to either reject the whole thing on the basis of an unpleasant surprise that appears from the papers, if that is the case, or indeed to jointly determine a new starting date.