Offices and Coworking Spaces: Tenants, Landlords and Building Rules

Why this matters

In a multi-tenant office building, the person who called you rents part of one floor. They do not own the roof, the riser, the fire alarm, the loading dock or the elevator, and the building has rules for using all of them that apply to you whether or not the tenant mentioned them. A tech who shows up without a certificate of insurance on file gets stopped at the security desk. A tech who fixes the tenant's problem by working on a landlord system has done unauthorized work on someone else's property, and the property manager will say so. Office work is easy money for a shop that learns the building's map of who owns what.

Three parties, three sets of systems

The ownership logic, who owns which piece of a shared building and why the lease decides it, is covered in Condo and Multifamily Work: Whose Property Is It? The commercial version adds a professional manager between you and the owner.

• The landlord owns the building. In a larger building that is often an investment company you will never talk to.
• The property manager runs the building for the landlord: rules, contractor approvals, base building maintenance, often a building engineer on staff. This is who decides whether you may touch anything outside the tenant's space.
• The tenant leases a suite. A tenant's facilities person or office manager is your customer for work inside the suite, to the extent the lease makes it the tenant's.

What usually falls on each side. The split is set by each lease, so treat this as the common pattern and check it every time:

The tenant can authorize work on what the lease makes theirs. Only the property manager can authorize work on base building systems, even if the tenant will end up paying for it. See related: Who Can Actually Authorize Work in a Business.

The building's contractor rules

Most managed office buildings publish a contractor rules sheet, sometimes as a lease exhibit, sometimes on the management office's website. Get it before the first visit. It looks something like this:

CONTRACTOR RULES - COMMERCE TOWER
Management office: Suite 110, front lobby
SECURITY
  Sign in at lobby desk; badge worn visibly
  Work order or tenant authorization shown
HOURS
  Standard work: weekdays 7:00 am to 6:00 pm
  Noisy work (core drilling, hammer drills,
  powder-actuated tools): after 6:00 pm or
  weekends only, 48 hours notice
ELEVATORS
  Hand-carried tool bags: passenger cars OK
  Carts, ladders, materials: freight only
  Freight booked 24 hours ahead with mgmt
  After-hours freight: building operator
LOADING DOCK
  Deliveries 6:00 to 10:00 am, 30 min limit
INSURANCE
  Certificate of insurance on file before
  first entry; owner and manager named as
  additional insureds; limits per Exhibit F
LIFE SAFETY
  Fire alarm devices: building vendor only
  Hot work: permit from management
  Ceiling access: notify management;
  restore fire stopping at penetrations

What each section means in practice:

• Security. You will be asked whose work order you are on. Have the tenant's name, suite and contact in the job notes before you arrive.
• Hours. Quiet work during the day, loud work at night or on weekends. Office tenants complain fast and the property manager hears it.
• Elevators. The freight booking is the rule that most often costs a day. If you need a cart, a ladder taller than a step stool, or a replacement unit, you need the freight car, and you need it booked.
• Insurance. A certificate of insurance (COI) is a document from your insurance agent showing your coverage. Buildings require it on file, naming the owner and the manager as additional insureds, at the limits the lease or rules state. Your agent issues these; the turnaround can be same day if you ask early. What the coverage actually does is a question for your agent.
• Life safety. In most office buildings, nobody but the building's fire alarm vendor touches a smoke detector, pull station or horn, and only management can put the alarm into test or bypass. If you need to work near a detector with dust or heat, ask management to have it handled. Penetrations through rated walls or floors get their fire stopping restored.

Coworking adds a layer

A coworking space is usually a tenant itself: the operator leases floors from the landlord and sells desks, offices and memberships to its members. That creates one more layer:

• Members have a license to use space, not a lease. A member cannot authorize work on the operator's space, even inside a private office they rent.
• The operator's community or facilities manager authorizes work inside the coworking space, to the extent the operator's lease makes it theirs.
• The property manager still governs base building systems and the building rules.

Coworking spaces are also denser than ordinary offices. Members on calls, open desks with screens and papers, shared phone booths, and a shared IT or network closet. Keep out of members' screens and papers, keep noise down during business hours, and treat the network closet as a critical system: do not unplug, move or power down anything in it without the operator's approval. See related: How to Work in a Telecom Closet Without Dropping the Network.

Worked example: a server room split system that drips

A law firm leasing half of the fifth floor calls on a Tuesday at 10:00 a.m.: water is dripping from the indoor unit of the split system that cools their server room. The lease makes the supplemental system the tenant's. Its condensate drain runs to a base building condensate riser in the corridor wall.

Before dispatch, 10:00 to 12:30. The office pulls the building's contractor rules from the management office's website. The shop's COI is not on file. The office asks the shop's insurance agent for a certificate naming the owner and the manager as additional insureds, at the limits stated in the rules' insurance exhibit. The agent emails it to the management office at 12:10, and management confirms receipt at 12:30.

First visit, 1:30 p.m. The tech signs in, shows the tenant's work order, and carries a tool bag and a step stool up in a passenger car, which the rules allow. In the server room, the tech finds the indoor unit's drain pan full and its condensate pump running but not moving water. The pump's discharge line runs about 15 feet to a connection on the corridor riser. The tech disconnects the line at the pump and blows it clear toward the riser. It is clear up to the connection, and water backs out of the riser when the line is reconnected.

The boundary. The blockage is in the base building riser, not in the tenant's line. The tech stops there. The riser belongs to the landlord; the tenant cannot authorize work on it and the tech is not going to open the corridor wall to get at it. The tech calls the building engineer through the management office and explains: the tenant's line is clear to the connection, the riser is backing up, and other tenants on the stack may be affected.

Temporary protection. To keep the server room dry tonight, the tech sets the pump to discharge into a temporary container with a high-level float that shuts the unit off before overflow, and tells the tenant's office manager it must be emptied twice a day. The float matters in both directions: it keeps water off the floor, but a unit it shuts off is a server room heating up overnight, so the container is sized to last well past the gap between emptyings and the office manager knows the unit stopping is the signal to call. The tenant approves this as in-suite work.

Second visit, Wednesday. The building engineer clears the riser at 9:00 a.m. with the building's own drain contractor. The tech returns at 2:00 p.m., reconnects the discharge line to the riser, and runs the unit for 20 minutes to confirm the pump empties and the riser takes the water. The tech also replaces the pump, which had been running dry against a blocked line and was noisy. The new pump comes up on the freight elevator, booked at 1:50 p.m. Tuesday, a little over 24 hours ahead, the moment the riser diagnosis made a second visit likely.

Notes. The job record names the tenant, the property manager's contact, the boundary between tenant line and riser, and the temporary container arrangement with its removal time.

What would have changed it. If the blockage had been in the tenant's own discharge line, the tech would have cleared it on the first visit and been done. If the lease had made the riser's maintenance the tenant's responsibility, which some single-tenant-floor leases do, the tech would still have needed the property manager's approval to open a corridor wall, because the corridor is a common area.

How to verify you have it right

Before you dispatch to any multi-tenant office, the job record should show: the tenant's name, suite and authorizing contact; the property manager's contact; the building rules sheet on file; the shop's COI confirmed on file at management; and whether the work needs the freight elevator or after-hours time. After the work, it should show which side of the tenant-landlord boundary each repair was on and who approved it.

References

• Your building's contractor rules or lease exhibit, from its property management office
• Your insurance agent, for certificates of insurance and what the coverage does
• See related: Condo and Multifamily Work: Whose Property Is It?; Who Can Actually Authorize Work in a Business
• See related: How Commercial Work Really Differs From Residential