Practice 03 · Adaptive Use
Los Angeles · Orange County · Inland Empire
We convert office and commercial stock into hard-tech space — data rooms, clean rooms, and light fab — by solving the part that kills most conversions: service capacity, transformer and switchgear, cooling and water, and change-of-use approvals.
Ranges are planning benchmarks — every building is screened on its own service, gear, and slab.
01 — The Problem
Vacant office and retail is cheap. Hard-tech tenants are the ones who want it. But the deal that pencils on rent almost never pencils on infrastructure — because nobody priced the service upgrade before the LOI.
The architecture is the easy half. The utility path decides whether the conversion is a twelve-month project or a three-year one.
Holding a half-empty asset with a tenant willing to sign — and no idea whether the existing 1,200A service can carry a 4MW load, or what the upgrade costs.
Needs racks, tools, or a cleanroom online by a funding milestone — and finds out in month five that the utility queue, not the buildout, sets the date.
Underwrote the conversion on rent per square foot — then hit vault space, riser capacity, roof structure for cooling, and a change-of-use review nobody scheduled.
Asked to finance a conversion whose largest single line item — utility infrastructure — is the one with no drawings, no quote, and no committed date.
Receives a load letter with no load study behind it, sends it back, and the twelve-month clock everyone assumed had started has not started at all.
Screen the power first, and the conversion becomes a schedule instead of a gamble.
02 — Conversion Paths
Each path is the same discipline in a different envelope: establish what the building can carry today, design the delta, and drive it through the utility and the AHJ in parallel.
Edge and enterprise compute in Class B floorplates. Service and transformer sizing, UPS and generator siting, riser and busway routing, floor loading, and heat rejection that the roof can actually hold.
N+1 · 415/240V · CRAH or liquidISO-class space inside retail and commercial shells. Clean power and grounding, process cooling, make-up air and exhaust, DI water and drainage, plus the gas, chemical, and hazmat approvals that follow.
ISO 5–8 · process cooling · exhaustAssembly, test, and integration space in flex and industrial stock. Three-phase distribution to tool points, compressed air and vacuum, crane and equipment power, yard service, and EV or fleet charging.
480V 3Ø · tool drops · yard serviceLoad studies, will-serve and service planning applications, transformer and vault siting, primary routing across the site, metering and CT cabinets, and the negotiation over who pays for what — run with LADWP, SCE, and SoCalGas the same way we run them in Hard Tech and Rebuild.
Occupancy reclassification, fire and life safety, hazardous materials, structural review for equipment and roof loads, landlord and CC&R consent, and the permit sequencing that keeps utility design and building plan check from waiting on each other.
What we deliver
03 — Who We Serve
Know which of your buildings can take the load before you market them.
Portfolio screening that ranks assets by service capacity, upgrade cost, and time to energize — so leasing knows what it can credibly promise a hard-tech tenant.
Screen a portfolio →Sign the space that can be energized on your timeline.
Site selection support, load modeling for your equipment list, and utility coordination from LOI through commissioning — so the funding milestone and the meter set line up.
Model your load →Underwrite the infrastructure before you underwrite the rent.
Pre-acquisition utility diligence, upgrade budgets with utility contribution modeled, and a permitting sequence that does not add a year to the pro forma.
Run diligence →The riskiest line item in a conversion loan is the one with no drawings.
Independent read on utility scope, cost, and schedule risk — including what happens to the collateral if the service upgrade slips two quarters.
See the feasibility layer →04 — Building Stock
Southern California · LADWP & SCE territory
Vertical · shared riser
The cheapest square footage in the market and the hardest to power. Shared risers, house panels sized for tenants who left, no vault space at grade, and a roof that was never asked to carry heat rejection. Where a data room lives or dies on the electrical room and the shaft.
Slab-on-grade · surface parking
Big-box and strip shells convert well: room at grade for a pad transformer, generator, and chiller yard, and a clear span that a cleanroom can be built inside. The fight moves to change-of-use, parking counts, and neighbors.
Existing 3Ø · yard access
Already has three-phase, height, and truck access — the shortest path to light fab. The work is capacity headroom, tool-point distribution, and whether the feeder serving the park has anything left to give.
05 — The Feasibility Layer
Before anyone signs, we pull the existing service and gear, walk the electrical rooms and the roof, model the tenant's real demand load, and check the serving circuit — then say plainly whether the building can carry it, at what cost, and by when.
Run across a portfolio it becomes a ranking: which assets are conversion-ready today, which need a transformer, and which should never be marketed as hard-tech space at all.
Request a feasibility screen06 — Field Work
A tenant wanted compute floors in a mid-rise with a house service sized for offices. The riser had no room for new busway and the roof could not carry the units the load required. We modeled the real demand, found the service and shaft path, and phased the buildout to the utility's delivery date instead of the lease date.
→ A scope and a date both sides could sign, instead of an LOI that would have died in month six.
A retail shell had the clear span for ISO-class space but no path for exhaust, DI water, or the hazmat review the process triggered. We sequenced utility design, structural review, and the AHJ submittals in parallel rather than end to end.
→ Approvals ran alongside design instead of after it.
An assembly and test operation needed tool-point distribution and yard charging in a flex building whose serving circuit was already loaded. We took the capacity question to the utility early, sited a new pad and primary run, and kept the tenant's equipment schedule intact.
→ Capacity solved at the circuit, not discovered at inspection.
An owner was marketing every vacant floor as convertible. We screened the assets on existing service, gear vintage, vault and riser space, and serving-circuit headroom — and separated the buildings that were genuinely conversion-ready from the ones that were not.
→ Leasing stopped promising power the buildings could not deliver.
07 — The Ask
Every hard-tech tenant looking for space in Southern California is competing for the small subset of buildings that can actually be energized. We want to talk to the owners, operators, and capital deciding which buildings those are.
08 — Contact
Send the address, the existing service if you know it, and what the tenant needs to run. We come back with whether it carries, what the upgrade looks like, and how long it takes.
A screen takes days, not months, and it is the cheapest work in the entire project. You get a plain answer — carries as-is, carries with an upgrade, or does not carry — with the cost and the schedule behind it.
Screen a Building → Reviewed by a consultant, not a bot