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Most of what makes a wayleave slow is not the drafting. It is the negotiation: an operator objects to something in a proposed agreement, says so in an email, and the two sides then hold a conversation that lives in an inbox and ends with somebody retyping a document. On Wayline that conversation is a record. Each disputed term is its own item, each item gets an answer, and the agreement cannot be sent for signature while an item is unanswered.

Where negotiation sits

The landlord proposes terms from the building’s saved preferences, and Wayline drafts the agreement from them. At that point the operator has three options: accept the terms as they stand, raise a change request, or walk away.
1

Terms are proposed

The landlord proposes terms and Wayline generates the draft agreement. The landlord can preview the agreement PDF before proposing it.
2

The operator responds

Accept as they stand, and the request moves on. Or raise a change request against one or more terms, which moves the request into negotiation.
3

The landlord answers every item

Each contested term is accepted, rejected or countered. A rejection has to carry a reason. The whole response goes back to the operator together.
4

The operator closes the counters

Where the landlord countered, the operator can accept that counter. A counter is an offer rather than a change: nothing moves until it is accepted.
5

Accepted changes are written into the agreement

The landlord applies them, and the agreement is regenerated with the new values. A new version is produced and the old one is retained.

What can be negotiated

Five terms, and the list is fixed:
Those five are not a selection from a longer list of screens. They are the terms the agreement itself records, so they are the terms an accepted change has somewhere to be written to. Anything outside them is discussed in the request’s message thread rather than contested as an item.For what each of those clauses is doing in the agreement, and what the rest of the document covers, see what a wayleave agreement contains.

What a change request is

A change request is one record covering everything the operator disputes at once, raised against a specific version of the agreement. It holds an item per term, each carrying the current value and the value the operator is asking for. Only one change request is open at a time. An operator cannot run two negotiations in parallel on the same request, which is what keeps the record readable and stops two answers arriving for the same term. Every item gets an answer. The landlord works through the items and returns the whole set together, rather than replying term by term as an email thread would. Each item comes back as:
  • Accepted, in which case the new value is applied to the agreement
  • Rejected, which requires a reason
  • Countered, with a different value from either the current one or the one asked for
A counter is an offer, not an application. Countering does not change the agreement. The operator has to accept the counter before anything moves, and until they do the term still holds its original value.

Why nothing reaches signature unanswered

A request that has reached approval has no open change request. This is enforced rather than encouraged: the path to signature closes while an item is outstanding, so an agreement cannot be signed with a disputed term quietly left as it was. If a request is withdrawn or declined while a change request is open, that change request is closed as moot and recorded as such, rather than left hanging.

Versions

A change request is raised against the version the operator was looking at. If the landlord revises the terms in the meantime and generates a new version, the change request raised against the earlier one does not silently disappear: it remains attached to the version it was raised against, so the record shows what was contested and what it was contested against. Accepting changes produces a new version too. Every version is retained with the reason it exists, so the sequence from first proposal to signed agreement can be read back in order.

The operator’s own template

Operators can upload their own wayleave template rather than using the Wayline standard one, and Wayline reviews it automatically when they do. The review compares it against the request and flags where the template and the request disagree. A landlord can turn this off per building. Where it is off, operators must use the Wayline standard template, and the negotiation above is the only route to changed terms.

What happens after signature

Renewal, expiry notices and what a completed agreement does for the rest of its term.