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Across the Table: The Commercial Field Manual · 02 The room →

All parts: 01 Before you drive · 02 The room · 03 The walk · 04 Paperwork and the climb · 05 The long middle · 06 When it goes sideways · 07 Your own system · Carry cards

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Twenty minutes of work separates you from every restoration contractor who shows up with a truck and a logo.

A RocketLevel piece for the people who walk commercial buildings, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 4-minute read.

1.1 The twenty-minute workup

The goal is four or five specifics, so that when you walk in you are not asking them to explain their own building to you. That changes the first ninety seconds more than anything else you can do.

Pull this

• [ ] Property type, rough square footage, number of floors
• [ ] Approximate year built
• [ ] Owner of record, and whether it is a portfolio or a one-off
• [ ] The management company, if the owner is not the operator
• [ ] Ground-floor and tenant uses, especially anything with water in it
• [ ] The name and title of the person you are meeting
• [ ] Whether your company has ever worked at this address
• [ ] Permit history from the city or county. Permits are public, and one for water damage repair, mold remediation or a roof replacement is loss history you did not have to ask for
• [ ] The unit this building counts downtime in. Room-nights at a hotel. Procedures moved at a medical building. Tenant disruption and lease exposure in office and retail. Displaced residents and habitability deadlines in multifamily. Minutes at a data center. Your decision maker is judged on how little disruption the building felt, so learn their unit before you walk in rather than asking them to translate yours
• [ ] Which fiscal year they run, because it decides when a budget conversation is real. Most private owners run the calendar year. School districts, universities and many municipalities run July to June. Federal runs October to September. In the programs we run, the budget conversation happens 3 to 4 months before the year opens.

Skip this

• Their company's About page and history
• Anything you will not use in the first ten minutes
• Deep research on a building you have not confirmed they control
• Memorizing your own certifications, which they did not ask about

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The last one is not optional. Walking into an account your own company already has history with, without knowing it, is a self-inflicted wound you cannot undo.

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Keep it to twenty minutes. If the workup takes an hour you are researching instead of selling, and the account is not paying you for it.

What year built actually tells you

It does not tell you the plumbing and the roof. Those are the two systems most likely to have been replaced, and a facility director will say so. What it tells you is the code era and which regulated materials you have to assume are present until somebody tests.

Pre-1981. Treat thermal system insulation, meaning pipe and fitting lagging, boiler and duct insulation, and sprayed or troweled-on fireproofing and acoustical surfacing, as asbestos-containing. Treat asphalt and vinyl flooring material installed no later than 1980 the same way, because the regulation names it separately and by name. That presumption comes from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and it sits in 29 CFR 1910.1001(j)(2) for general industry and 1926.1101 for construction work.

Note the scope limit. The presumption covers those material classes. It is not a blanket rule for everything in a pre-1981 building. Mastic, joint compound and ceiling texture sit outside it and went in well past 1980, so handle them the same way in the field without calling them the presumption. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asbestos rule under the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) requires a thorough inspection of the affected facility for asbestos before any demolition or renovation begins, regardless of the building's age, at 40 CFR 61.145(a). A rep who says "built after 1980, so no asbestos concern" is saying something wrong.

Lead. EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) rule does not apply to commercial space unless the work is in a child-occupied facility inside it. It does apply in the pre-1978 multifamily book and to a pre-1978 daycare tenant. "We're RRP certified so we're covered" means nothing in an office tower.

The question worth asking: do you have an asbestos survey and an operations and maintenance program for this building? Write down the answer.

What goes in the bag

Bring examples. A property manager cannot picture a response plan, but hand them one and they can.

• [ ] A redacted sample Emergency Response Plan from a real building
• [ ] A blank or redacted Master Service Agreement or Priority Service Agreement