Talk through your lot

What to have to hand

1. The address. Where the property is in the Valley tells us a great deal on its own — the age of the building stock, the kind of traffic it carries and what the soil under it tends to do.
2. Roughly how many square feet of pavement there is, and what the property does. A medical office, a distribution site and a retail center are three different pavements even at the same size.
3. What is bothering you about it. Cracking, potholes, water standing after a storm, faded striping, or simply that it looks tired. Each of those points at a different answer.

What is worth photographing

Two sets of photographs are worth more than a long description. The first is the worst areas — wherever the surface is breaking up, wherever patches have failed, wherever the pavement is rutted or pushed into ridges. The second is anywhere water sits after rain, taken while it is still sitting there.

That second set is the one almost nobody sends, and it is frequently the one that decides the project. Drainage is the least visible item on any asphalt scope and the highest return, because water in the base is how a surface problem becomes a structural one.

What happens next

A site walk. Between the photographs and an hour on the property, the questions that decide the project get answered: whether the distress starts at the surface or underneath it, what the drainage is doing, where the loading actually concentrates, how the site can be phased without closing the tenants, and what the striping needs to become rather than what it currently is.

Before that point a figure carries no information. Two contractors can look at the same lot and honestly propose completely different scopes — one sees a surface to seal, the other sees a base to rebuild — so settling the findings first is what makes any later proposal comparable to any other.

If you are buying the property

This is a good time to call. The pavement is one of the larger deferred-maintenance items on most commercial sites, and the things that decide what it will cost — whether the base is sound, where water stands, how the lot can be phased, whether the striping layout still works — are all checkable before closing. A lot that looks tired and a lot that is structurally failing photograph almost identically and are not the same liability.

Request a callback

Send the address and what the surface is doing. We will call you back.