Los Angeles Soft Story Buildings are not as safe as they should be. If you own one of them, it is important to know that you might have a serious problem on your hands. A soft story building is a type of residential or commercial building with an open ground floor and few columns supporting the upper floors. These buildings can shift and sway when there are heavy winds or earthquakes which makes them more prone to damage than other types of buildings.
This blog post will show you how Los Angeles soft story building owners can avoid losing rental income while retrofitting their soft story building according to the required soft story retrofit program by minimizing the impact to their tenant’s way of life through habitability experience and knowledge about what disrupts tenants as little as possible.
Los Angeles Soft Story Retrofit Projects Should Keep Tenants in Mind
As a property owner, you want all of your construction projects to be designed with your tenants in mind. Soft story building retrofits are no different. Here, at Retrofitting360, one of the most important things we consider when working on a soft story retrofit project is how it will affect your tenants and what you can do to minimize that disruption.
Keeping your tenants in place means no disruption in rental income for you and means your tenants can go about their lives as normal. Retrofitting 360 soft story retrofit projects are engineered to create minimal disruptions.
However, in extreme cases, tenants may have to relocate during the retrofitting process. In some Los Angeles areas, regulations require us to relocate all tenants if the property is considered uninhabitable for longer than 30 days. Other Los Angeles regulations require tenants to relocate if the project extends beyond the original completion date by more than 30 days. When planning your project, your engineer will keep these regulations in mind.
Your Soft Story Retrofit Engineer Should Have Habitability Experience
The cost of having to relocate your tenants during a soft story retrofit project can be astronomical. Most property owners prefer to keep their tenants in place as a way to keep the overall cost of the project down, but they also prefer not to have their rental income interrupted. If you are planning a retrofitting project for a soft-story building, you want to inquire about your tenants’ impacts when getting your bids.
Ask your seismic engineer questions about how they will disrupt your tenants as little as possible.
If you are planning a retrofitting project for soft-story building, it is important to ask your seismic engineer about how they will disrupt your tenants as little as possible.
- How long will the soft story retrofit project take to complete?
- What days of the week do you plan on working and what hours?
- How do you plan to accommodate the tenants during the course of the project?
- Will parking be affected throughout the duration of the soft story retrofit project, or will it only be affected during the day?
No matter what other questions you ask, your goal for your soft story retrofit project is to find a retrofitting contractor who has a plan in place to disrupt your tenants as little as possible. The best retrofitting contractors will provide you with a detailed plan for your Los Angeles soft story retrofit project. The plan will include details in regards to maintaining a safe work environment, what they plan to do with parking during the day and at night when construction is done for the day, how they plan to cover any trenches, and much more.
Before hiring a retrofitting contractor, talk to them about a daily clean-up plan. The construction site should be cleaned up each day once work has been completed. Daily clean-up should not be limited to picking up trash and extra materials; it should also include the proper storage of all power tools and materials.
As a property owner, it is your responsibility to talk to the city of Los Angeles in regards to habitability requirements. Our team of experts at Retrofitting 360 is also knowledgeable about these regulations and will happily discuss them with you during our free site evaluation.
