You just signed a lease agreement for a commercial space for your business, which can be exciting, but also mildly terrifying! Now what? If you’re like most business owners, you want to get your business up and running in your new space as quickly as possible, but first you need to make the space suitable for your specific business. It’s rarely the case that a commercial space will already have all of the elements necessary for your business activities and be able to accommodate your staff perfectly. Therefore, you will need to do some tenant improvements.
Some tenant improvements in Long Beach CA are purely cosmetic. They can involve things like painting, replacing flooring, adding storage, and/or updating the reception area to match your company’s brand. However, in many cases, tenant improvements can go beyond just cosmetic upgrades to include things like moving walls, upgrading the electrical, plumbing, or ventilation systems to accommodate equipment, and bringing the space up to current building codes. In the latter case, you will almost certainly need to bring in a Long Beach architect, but you may be surprised to learn that you might need one in the former case as well.
According to LongBeachArchitects.com, “In Long Beach, obtaining the proper business license from the City requires you to submit quite a bit of paperwork, including a site plan and a floor plan for the commercial space in which your business will be operating….Long Beach officials don’t just want documentation of your space for their records—they want to make sure that the space is completely up to code. Most commercial spaces, unfortunately, are not. The building code changes every three years, so even a building that’s less than a decade old could be out of compliance in one area or another. When this is the case (and it almost always is), the business owner will then need to make the needed changes to bring the space up to code before they will be issued a business license by the City of Long Beach.”
Bringing a commercial space up to code will almost certainly require the assistance of a Long Beach architect—one who is familiar with local building codes and knows what city officials are looking for in commercial site plans and floor plans. A Long Beach tenant improvement architect can draw up the plans that show the city how the space will be brought up to code, and can also include any other changes you want to make to the space. Yes, hiring an architect will cost some money, but you may be able to get your landlord to cover the cost—especially if you can show that the space is out of compliance with current building codes and needs updates.
A good tenant improvement architect can also help you make the best use of your commercial space. They are experts in space planning and will likely have creative ideas that you may not have been able to come up with on your own.
