The electrical side of a commercial tenant improvement

A tenant improvement has a deadline that doesn’t move. Your lease has a commencement date, your fixturing period is finite, and rent starts whether or not the occupancy inspection passed. That single fact shapes every decision on the electrical side.

We’ve wired retail, warehouse, and community spaces around the Lower Mainland, and the projects that land on time are the ones where the electrical scope was understood before the lease was signed. Here’s what that means in practice.

Find out what the base building actually gives you

The first question on any TI is where the landlord’s work stops and yours starts. It’s in the lease, usually in a work letter or a base building definition, and it’s worth reading closely rather than assuming.

What you’re looking for: how much power is brought to your premises and at what voltage, whether there’s a panel in the space or just a feeder stub, whether the service is single phase or three phase, and whether lighting, exit signage, and emergency lighting are provided or are yours to install.

The number that matters most is available capacity. A space that was previously an office and is becoming a restaurant or a shop with real equipment is a completely different load, and the base building may not have anticipated it. Finding that out during construction is expensive. Finding it out before you sign is a negotiating position.

Three phase is the other one to check early. A lot of commercial equipment wants it, and if the building doesn’t have it at your premises, adding it is not a small change order.

What the scope usually covers

For a typical retail or office fit-out:

• Distribution: panels, subpanels, and circuits laid out to the tenant’s plan
• Lighting, including whatever the energy code requires for controls and switching
• Exit signs and emergency lighting, which are life safety items and get inspected as such
• Power for equipment, point of sale, and specialty gear, sized off the actual equipment schedule
• Data and communications rough-in
• Signage circuits, which are easy to forget until the sign company shows up
• Coordination with mechanical for rooftop units, makeup air, and controls

The item that surprises first-time tenants most often is emergency and exit lighting. It isn’t optional, it’s part of what an inspector signs off on, and it has to be right before you get occupancy.

What actually delays these projects

Three things, over and over.

Equipment specs arriving late. We can’t size circuits for equipment nobody has selected yet. A kitchen or a shop where the equipment list is still moving in week four means either waiting or guessing, and guessing means rework. Get the equipment schedule locked as early as you can stand.

Ceiling coordination. Lighting, sprinklers, ductwork, and structure all want the same space above the ceiling grid. Sorting that on paper is cheap. Sorting it on a ladder with three trades waiting is not.

Inspection sequencing. Rough-in gets inspected before anything is covered. If drywall goes up ahead of that inspection, it comes back down. This is the single most common way a TI loses a week it didn’t have.

Permits and inspections work the same way here as on residential, with the authority depending on the municipality, which we laid out in who pulls your electrical permit in BC. On commercial the stakes are higher because occupancy depends on it.

Working in an occupied building

Most TIs happen in buildings where other tenants are open for business. That brings constraints worth pricing honestly rather than discovering later.

Shutdowns affecting other tenants get scheduled, noticed, and often done after hours. Work in shared corridors and electrical rooms runs on building management’s rules and access times. Noise and dust have limits during business hours. In some buildings the meaningful electrical work simply happens at night.

None of this is a problem when it’s planned. It’s only a problem when the schedule assumed regular hours and the building says otherwise in week two.

Plan backwards from the inspection

The way we sequence a TI is from the occupancy date backwards: occupancy inspection, then final electrical, then fixtures and devices, then the trades that cover our work, then rough-in inspection, then rough-in. That ordering tells you the real start date, and it’s usually earlier than people expect.

It also tells you where the float is. If the equipment schedule is the long pole, everything else can be arranged around it, but only if you know that in week one.

This is the commercial and tenant improvement side of what we do, and the case studies show the shape of it: the KMS Tools retail space and the Karameller candy store were both fit-outs with a hard opening date.

If the base building falls short

Sometimes the answer is that the premises need more than they have. That’s a service or distribution upgrade, and it’s the same category of work as a residential panel and service upgrade but with the building owner and the utility involved as well. It has a longer lead time than anything else on the job, which is exactly why it needs to be identified before the lease is signed rather than during construction.

We work across the region and the building stock varies a lot. A Vancouver retail space in an older building and a newer Surrey light-industrial unit present very different starting points.

The short version

Read the work letter, lock the equipment schedule early, and plan backwards from the occupancy inspection. If you’re looking at a space and want to know what the electrical will realistically take before you commit to a lease, get in touch and we’ll walk it with you.