You Just Bought a Commercial Building
Somewhere in it are systems you are now responsible for, on schedules nobody mentioned at closing, with a paper trail that may or may not have come across. Here is all of it in one place.
What you now own
Not every building has all of these. Each one is described by how you would recognise it, because you cannot look up equipment you cannot identify.
Heads in the ceiling, and a room somewhere near the front with a large vertical pipe, valves and gauges — usually the riser room.
A panel on a wall, often in an electrical or janitorial room, with a display and a trouble light. Pull stations by the exits.
On brackets or in cabinets, each with a tag showing service dates.
A brass or iron assembly with two shutoff valves and test cocks, usually where the water enters the building or in the riser room.
Illuminated EXIT signs and the twin-head battery units above doors and in corridors.
Only if there is a commercial cooking line. Nozzles above the appliances, a cylinder nearby, and a manual pull station on the way out.
A large pump and motor or diesel engine in its own room, usually with a controller cabinet beside it.
Hydrants on your own property rather than the street, and the fire department connection on the outside wall.
The records you should have got
Most of these do not appear in a normal closing package, and almost nobody asks for them. They are far easier to obtain in the first month than in the sixth.
This is the baseline. Without it nobody can tell whether a finding is new or has been carried forward and ignored for six years.
If nobody can tell you, that is the answer, and it means one is due. It is the most commonly skipped item in the whole standard.
Outstanding deficiencies transfer with the building. Finding out at your first inspection is finding out too late to have negotiated.
These say what the system was designed to protect. If the building's use has changed since, they are how anyone can tell the system is still adequate.
Monitoring often lapses at a transfer, and nobody notices until a signal is not answered. Confirm the account is in your name and being watched.
An impairment nobody formally closed out is still open. If there was work done before the sale, confirm the system was verified back in service.
The first thirty days
You would be surprised how often the new owner cannot get into the room that contains the shutoff for the whole system. Find them, make sure they are accessible and not being used for storage, and make sure more than one person has a key. If the panel is showing a trouble light, that is your first phone call.
Ring the monitoring company, confirm the account is active, confirm they have your contact details rather than the previous owner's, and ask them to send a test signal. This takes ten minutes and it is the single highest-value thing on this list.
Extinguishers, the backflow, the riser, the hood system. Every tag has dates on it. An afternoon with a phone camera gives you an inventory and tells you immediately what is out of date — which is usually more than you expect.
Ask the seller's contractor directly. They are generally willing, and the request is easier to make in the first month than in the sixth. If the relationship has gone cold, the records can usually be reconstructed from the AHJ's own filed copies.
A first visit establishes what you actually have and what condition it is in, and it produces the baseline report that everything afterwards is measured against. It is also how you find out about the five-year internal inspection nobody mentioned.
Quarterly, annual, semi-annual, five-year. The failure mode is not that owners refuse to maintain their systems — it is that a date passes, nobody is reminded, and eighteen months later an inspector asks a question nobody can answer.
If the seller handed over inspection reports, you can have one read for what it covers and what it leaves out. And if you are taking a system down for renovation work, the impairment kit produces the paperwork you are supposed to have.
Not sure what you have got?
Tell us the address and roughly what the building is used for. We will tell you what is likely in there and what is likely overdue, before you commit to anything.
Or call (614) 526-4995 and ask.