Industrial and Warehouse Property Condition Assessments: Roofs, Slabs, Docks, Doors and Truck Courts

A warehouse is a simple building with an expensive roof, a very large slab, a site built for trucks and a short list of equipment that tenants abuse every day. The E2018-24 baseline is the same as for any commercial property: a walk-through survey of the ten systems in section 9.4, document review and interviews, and opinions of cost. What changes is where the money is. This page is for the engineer writing an industrial PCR and for the buyer or lender reading one.

What is different about industrial

Who orders it. Acquisition buyers (often for a portfolio, where one report per building is rolled up), bank and CMBS lenders at origination or refinance, and owners before a lease-up or disposition. Rating-agency criteria for securitised loans include a chapter for industrial and flex buildings, and it points the consultant at the roof first: it asks for an emphasis on surveying and researching the roof, and for any prior roof survey, visual or infrared, to be reviewed and commented on. See CMBS criteria.

Scope emphasis. The building envelope and site carry most of the reserve. Interiors are usually a small office build-out plus open warehouse space, and HVAC is often limited to office rooftop units and unit heaters in the warehouse. The same criteria ask the report to describe a typical tenant space by its office-to-warehouse ratio, finishes, overhead doors and toilet rooms, and to comment on egress from the warehouse portion.

Tenant equipment. Racking, conveyors, forklift charging, process equipment and anything the tenant installed are usually tenant-owned. E2018-24 asks the report to note tenant-owned equipment rather than cost it; say whose it is and the source (lease, POC interview, or not provided).

The systems that drive cost

• Roof. Large low-slope membranes (TPO, EPDM, built-up) or standing-seam metal on pre-engineered buildings. Record main and canopy roofs separately, drains and scuppers, skylights and smoke vents, and rust on the underside of the metal deck seen from inside. See the roofing section.
• Slab on grade. Cracking, joint spalling at forklift paths, curling, settlement, and evidence of prior remediation such as pressure grouting. Design floor loads and mezzanine loads come from drawings, not observation; cite the document or say it was not provided.
• Structure and clear height. Pre-engineered or conventional steel, tilt-up or CMU walls. Look for racking or misalignment of sidewalls and rust at column bases and anchor bolts. Clear height is a marketing specification, not a condition item; if the report states it, give the source (measured at the lowest obstruction, from drawings, or from the offering memorandum).
• Dock equipment. Levelers (mechanical, hydraulic or air-powered), seals and shelters, bumpers, restraints and dock lights. Count them by type; operate a sample only if the POC permits.
• Overhead doors. Dock-high and grade-level doors: panels, jambs, headers, tracks, openers and bollards. Impact damage is the recurring finding.
• Fire protection. Wet or dry system, fire pump, riser and fire department connection, and the date of the last inspection tag. Whether the sprinkler design suits the current storage height and commodity is a fire protection engineer's question, outside the baseline scope; if the storage you saw looks higher or denser than the system appears designed for, recommend a review. See life safety.
• Site paving and truck courts. Heavy-duty asphalt or concrete in the truck court, concrete aprons at the docks, trench drains at depressed docks (ponding and silt at these drains are a named concern in the criteria), and landing-gear pads where trailers are dropped. See the site section.

Useful lives the reserve table uses

HUD values are the Family column of the CNA e-Tool table. The table is written for housing; where a warehouse component is not listed, the table's own instruction is to assign it to the most closely related category, and the reserve line should say which.

Component	HUD EUL (yrs)	HUD table row	Note
Low-slope thermoplastic membrane (TPO, vinyl)	15	3.3.4.2.4
Low-slope adhered EPDM	15	3.3.4.2.3
Sloped metal roof	50	3.3.4.1.2	standing seam
Roof skylight	30	3.3.4.3.8	also used for smoke vents, by mapping
Slab, reinforced concrete	100	3.3.1.1	repairs, not replacement, in the term
Precast concrete panel (tilt-up)	60	3.3.3.1.8
Overhead door	30	3.3.2.8.9
Automatic opener, overhead door	20	3.3.2.8.10
Dock leveler	20	3.3.2.8.10	not in HUD; mapped to the opener row as the closest powered door equipment
Asphalt pavement	25	3.2.4.1
Asphalt seal coat	5	3.2.4.2
Concrete pavement	50	3.2.4.3	dock aprons, truck courts
Package HVAC rooftop	15	3.4.3.1.11	office areas
Building fire suppression sprinklers, standpipes	50	3.6.1.1

The dock-leveler mapping is a judgment, not a HUD value; the reviewer can substitute the firm's own basis. See the HUD table and the reserve table explained.

Table 1 or Table 2

Table 1 (immediate and short-term) typically carries: active roof leaks and open seams; damaged overhead door panels or tracks that no longer close or secure; inoperable levelers at doors in use; trip and vehicle hazards in the truck court (potholes, broken dock aprons); ponding or clogged trench drains at depressed docks; missing bollards protecting doors or gas meters; an overdue sprinkler inspection or impaired fire pump; and damaged or blocked egress doors. Each immediate item states which E2018-24 test it meets (life safety, escalation, or a recorded code violation). See cost categories.

Table 2 (long-term) carries membrane replacement at the report year plus the RUL opinion, paving overlay and seal-coat cycles, overhead doors and levelers phased across the term when counts are large, office rooftop units, and exterior sealants. Slab joint repair can recur, but slab replacement does not belong in a reserve.

Access and sampling

Walk every building's envelope and base-building systems; the criteria allow sampling tenant spaces but not skipping a building. The roof needs safe access: a fixed ladder or hatch, or the owner's lift. If you did not walk it, say so and base the RUL on documents with the source stated. Occupied warehouses limit what you see: racking hides walls and slab, and tenant operations limit when docks can be operated. List areas not observed and why. See representative observations.

Common pitfalls

• Treating the roof warranty as a condition finding. It is a document; the RUL comes from what you observed.
• Costing tenant racking or process equipment.
• Printing clear height, floor load or power capacity with no source.
• Calling a slab crack structural without evidence of movement; describe width, pattern and displacement and recommend a structural review if it warrants one.
• Leaving the truck court out of the paving quantity because it is concrete.

Writing the report

Baseline PCR drafts each section from the field notes, photographs and documents in the E2018-24 order: description with sources, observations, what the point of contact reported, what was not observed and why, then recommendations tied to Table 1 or Table 2 lines. It computes quantities times unit costs from the firm's own library and marks any line without a unit cost as engineer to provide. The reviewer confirms the ratings, RUL opinions, mappings and categories, then edits and signs. The sample report shows the format on a 1985 office building; an industrial job follows the same structure with the emphasis above.