What to Check Before You Buy a Building

This is a portfolio sample. The source material was a fifteen-minute audio briefing from a structural engineer, along with a short set of appended notes. This is the same input a retainer client would supply. I had no prior knowledge of structural engineering. The article was produced from that material alone, with no external research.

Most people buy a building and then find out what they bought. By the time the walls are open and the engineer is on site, the price is already agreed and the surprises are the new owner’s problem. A few hours of checking before you commit decides which side of that line you end up on. Here is what I tell anyone who asks me what to look at first.

Get an existing conditions assessment before the sale closes, not after. The drawings a seller hands you show how the building was designed, not how it was built, modified, and repaired over the decades since. The only way to know what is actually in the walls and the frame is to have someone look while you can still walk away. An assessment that costs a few thousand dollars routinely turns up conditions that would have cost hundreds of thousands to discover after closing.

Find out how the building has been changed over its life. Every owner before you made decisions, and the ones that matter to you are the structural ones: a wall taken out, a floor added, a column boxed in or cut around. Those changes alter how load moves through the frame, and they are almost never drawn. Pull the building’s permit and renovation history, and read the silences as carefully as the records. A building with no documented work in forty years is not a building where nothing happened. It is a building where no one wrote it down.

Check the foundation and everything below grade. This is where the most expensive surprises live, because it is the part nobody looks at until something has already failed. Foundations settle, water finds its way in, and footings sized for the original building were never meant to carry what a renovation stacks on top of them. A problem you can see in a wall is a repair. A problem under the slab is an excavation, and the gap between those two numbers is large.

Trace how water has been handled over the years. Moisture is the quiet one. It works slowly and out of sight, rotting wood members, corroding steel connections, and breaking masonry down from the inside, and it shows you nothing until you open the assembly and find it. Roofs, flashing, grading, an old repair made with the wrong material: any of them can have been letting water in for years. By the time the damage is visible it is structural, and it has usually been spreading for a long time.

Budget for the permit timeline, not just the construction timeline. Owners plan with care for how long the work will take and forget that they cannot begin until the work is approved. Plan review for structural modifications has grown slow in many places, and a permit a contractor assumes will take a few weeks can take months. The risk is not only the delay. It is that your contractor, with other jobs waiting, may be gone by the time the approval lands.

Carry a real contingency, and treat it as a baseline rather than a hope. Renovation risk runs in one direction. When you open a wall, the best case is that the building is exactly what the drawings promised and you spent a little to confirm it. The walls cannot surprise you in your favor. They will never reveal that the structure is sounder than the record claimed. Set aside twenty percent on top of the bid as a working assumption, and count yourself lucky on the jobs where you do not touch it.

None of this is meant to talk you out of a building. An old building with a history is not a bad buy. It is a priced buy, and the price is only fair if you know what you are buying before you agree to it. Almost everything that goes wrong on these projects was knowable in advance. The buyers who get hurt are not the ones who took on difficult buildings. They are the ones who learned what they owned after the price was already set.

This sample was written from a single fifteen-minute briefing. If you want something like it for your firm, reach out via Email.

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