A purchase agreement on a commercial building comes with a due diligence period — thirty days, sixty if you negotiated well. It reads like plenty of time. Most of it is spent waiting: for access to be arranged, for a report to come back, for a specialist to look at the one thing the report flagged.
Commercial
A commercial building inspection is the appointment that tells you what else needs looking at — which is why it belongs at the start of that window rather than the end.
Work backwards from the end of a thirty-day due diligence period. You want a few days at the end to decide, and to renegotiate if the building has told you something you did not know when you signed. Before that, anything the inspection flags — a roof near the end of its service life, a rooftop unit that did not start, a drain line nobody can see — wants a specialist who has to be booked and will not come tomorrow. Before that, the report takes 24 to 72 hours depending on the size of the building. Before that, access has to be arranged with the seller and, if the building is occupied, with tenants who may be owed notice under their leases.
That is most of a month, and none of it is the inspection itself. Booking in week one leaves room for all of it. Booking in week three leaves you deciding on the strength of a report you have had no time to act on.
A home inspection runs to a fixed standard: the scope is set, and every inspection covers the same ground. A commercial inspection runs to the CCPIA Commercial Standards of Practice, where the scope is agreed between the inspector and the client before the work starts.
That is not a loophole. It is the only way one standard can cover both a 2,000 square foot retail unit and a 60,000 square foot warehouse. It does mean the scope is a conversation worth actually having rather than something to assume.
Two consequences surprise buyers more than anything else in the standard. On a building with many near-identical units, a representative sample is allowed rather than every single one, and the report says what was looked at. And a system shut down for the season cannot be operated — buy a building in January with the rooftop cooling winterised and the cooling gets noted, not run.
Under the commercial standard, arranging access is the client’s job rather than the inspector’s. In practice it is a short list to put to the seller well before the day:
It is the most common reason a commercial inspection takes longer than the buyer expected, and it is almost entirely avoidable. Ask for that list the week you go under contract, not the week of the inspection.
Most commercial buildings in Southeast Michigan come down to the same handful of things.
The roof. Low-slope membrane roofs have a service life, and where a building sits in that life is the single finding most likely to change what the building is worth to you. It is also the reason our inspectors get onto the roof where it can be reached safely, rather than judging it from the parking lot.
Rooftop units. Packaged HVAC is easy to ignore until the morning it does not start. Age, condition and whether it runs are all part of the inspection.
Electrical capacity. Not only condition, but whether the service is sized for what you intend to do in the building. A fit-out can want considerably more than the existing panel has.
What is underground. The drain and sewer lines are the one part of a building nobody can see, and the part that produces the most unwelcome surprises after closing. A sewer scope inspection runs a camera through the main line and settles the question while you can still act on the answer.
The inspection is the baseline. Two further tests are worth ordering at the same time when the building’s history suggests them, and both are easier to add at the start than to bolt on once the window is half gone.
Mold inspection and testing where there has been a roof leak, a plumbing failure, or a tenant space that sat empty and unconditioned. Air sampling puts a measured number on what is in the air rather than leaving it to a smell and an argument — and it is the question a prospective tenant is most likely to put to you after they have signed.
Radon testing is measured over a set period rather than observed, so it genuinely cannot be added at the last minute. Michigan has plenty of elevated readings, and lenders and tenants ask about it more often than they used to.
You get the findings in plain English with the photographs that support them, normally within 24 to 72 hours of the site visit, written so that somebody who was not there can still find the thing being described.
What it will not do is put a price on any of it. That sits outside the commercial standard, and it is also the right answer: repair figures belong to the contractors who would do the work. Trademark Inspection Services does not do repairs, which is exactly why our read on a building is worth having.
Two other things sit outside the inspection and are routinely assumed to be inside it. Code compliance is a matter for the municipality. ADA compliance is a specialist assessment in its own right. Neither is part of a commercial building inspection, and a report claiming otherwise would be overreaching.
Size and complexity decide it far more than the type of building. A small retail unit can be a few hours; a large warehouse or a multi-tenant building can take a day or more. The report follows within 24 to 72 hours of the site visit.
Only with commercial training, and working to the commercial standard. The two are different disciplines with different standards of practice, and a residential inspection carried out on a commercial building would not cover what a commercial buyer actually needs. Ours are carried out by CCPIA-certified inspectors.
Where it can be reached safely, yes — by hatch or by ladder. The roof matters too much on a commercial building to assess from the ground. Where it cannot be reached safely, the report says so and says why, rather than implying a look nobody had.
Often, yes. A commercial lease can make you responsible for maintaining or replacing systems you never inspected, and rooftop units are the usual example. Knowing the condition of what you are taking on changes what you are willing to sign.
Due diligence is not the inspection. It is everything the inspection sets in motion — and the only part of it you fully control is how early in the window you start.
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