The rental market in Southern California is both highly competitive and highly regulated. You can give yourself a strong edge in it by ensuring that you always provide the highest quality accommodation to both commercial and residential tenants. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know and how commercial contractors can help.
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The Value of an Apartment Remodel
Apartments are intended to last for years, often decades, sometimes centuries. This means that it’s really inevitable that they will become dated. Dated apartments are less attractive to tenants and hence attract lower rents. This is why it literally pays to invest in an apartment remodel.
In particular, apartment remodels can help you to make the most of the space within an apartment. There’s generally a direct connection between the usable space in an apartment and the rent you can charge for it. This is particularly true if an apartment remodel creates space for an extra bedroom.
Even just giving an apartment a more spacious look and feel can make it a lot more attractive to prospective tenants. This can feed through to higher rents, longer leases, and lower tenant churn. It may also encourage tenants who move out to recommend the apartment to someone they know. This means that you can have a new, pre-vetted tenant lined up before your old ones have left.
Current Trends in Apartment Remodeling
Up until fairly recently, there was a clear trend towards opening up apartments, at least in public areas. This had the benefit of creating more usable floor space and hence allowing more space for people to walk. The downside, however, was a loss of privacy and soundproofing.
This has resulted in people now walking back a little from true open-plan layouts to semi-open-plan layouts. These balance openness with privacy and soundproofing. They are therefore better suited to how people are currently using their apartments.
Another major trend in apartment remodeling is reconfiguring apartments to make them more suitable for home working. While there has been some debate about home-working versus remote working, this does look like a trend that’s here for the long term. All the signs point to companies adapting to remote/hybrid working models.
Last but definitely not least, apartment remodeling may be required to improve accessibility. This does not necessarily mean specific adaptations for disability (although it can). It often simply means improving functionality for tenants with certain lifestyle restrictions. For example, older tenants may need bathrooms to be remodeled to include extra safety features.
Commercial Apartment Remodeling
Commercial apartment remodeling uses as much of the existing structure as possible. This minimizes the amount of work involved and hence the costs and disruption. It, therefore, maximizes value and allows landlords to bring in new tenants in the shortest possible time.
A commercial apartment remodel does not have to mean a complete overhaul of a whole apartment. That is possible, many times, however, landlords simply want a kitchen remodel and/or a bathroom remodel. Kitchens and bathrooms are both very important to tenants as there is limited scope for them to upgrade these themselves.
Apartment Remodeling and Tenant Improvement
Tenant improvement is often standard with longer leases. In simple terms, tenants are only likely to commit to long leases if they’re sure that an apartment will suit them for the entirety of their stay there. That usually means allowing some level of customization to suit the tenant’s particular needs and wants.
When a lease is up for renegotiation, it’s very common for tenant improvement to come up for discussion. Most of the time, it’s in everyone’s best interests to come to an agreement on this.
If the tenants have been good tenants, the landlord will want to keep them. Similarly, if the landlord has been a good landlord, the tenants will want to stay with them. Apartment remodeling can help to make that happen so everyone benefits.
Commercial Tenant Improvement
On a side note, similar comments apply to commercial tenant improvement contractors. In fact, commercial tenant improvement is arguably even more important than residential tenant improvement. All businesses need to function as organizations. That generally means that they prefer workplaces that can be customized to their own process flows and specific needs.
Furthermore, these process flows and specific needs may change over the course of a lease period. This is particularly likely with commercial leases as they are often longer than residential ones. As a result, commercial tenant improvement and remodel can be a major issue during the lease-negotiation process.
Apartment Remodeling Contractors
In the real world, price is likely to be a factor landlords take into consideration when choosing apartment remodeling contractors. That’s understandable. It is, however, important to set this in context.
There’s a limit on how much apartment remodeling contractors can save through negotiating great prices on materials and working efficiently. If you get a lowball estimate from an apartment remodeling contractor it therefore generally means that they are going to cut corners somewhere. That may mean lower-grade materials or cutbacks on labor or both.
Either way, accepting that lowball offer is very likely to come back to bite you later. It really is worth sticking to reputable licensed general contractors and/or commercial general contractors.
Licensed General Contractors
Choosing licensed general contractors is your guarantee of high-quality work. You’ll never find a licensed general contractor just disappearing with your money. You’ll never find yourself racing around to find another contractor after a letdown. Most importantly of all, you’ll never find yourself on the wrong side of a tenant’s lawsuit after work goes wrong.
Commercial General Contractors
There can be significant differences between residential property and commercial property. This means that it’s best to use experienced commercial general contractors for any work relating to commercial property.
Residential and commercial construction plans and permitting
We can help you with anything to do with residential and commercial construction plans and permitting. Any building work we carry out is always done in full compliance with the law. That means you should never have any issues with local authorities, your insurance company, or your tenants.