Certificate of occupancy rejected over parking? Here is how we handle it.

  📍 Oh my God, the City declined the certificate of occupancy for my new tenant!? What do I do?

Hey everybody. Joseph Gozlan with Eureka Business Group, your retail navigator for the Dallas Fort Worth market.

And I get that question all the time. I get a phone call from a shopping center owner or a commercial real estate owner and they tell me, Hey, I have a new tenant. I already signed the lease. They went to the City and the City declined their certificate of occupancy and the reason they gave was parking.

What do I do? Well, it’s complicated, and that’s where we step in and we try to help as much as we can. The first thing we ask is, well, what is the use that the tenant is going to do? Sometimes it’s because their use is very demanding, like a restaurant- demands a lot of parking spaces in most City ordinances, and sometimes it’s because the use doesn’t conform with the zoning.

So we’re stepping in, we’re trying to figure it out. I’d say 8 times outta 10. It’s because of parking. It’s crazy. I know, but that’s just the reality of things. The City looks at how many parking spots the shopping center has. They look at every single tenant that is in the shopping center and what their use is, and they do this little math because they have the matrix of per use, how many vehicles they need, and how many parking spots should be allocated to that space.

And if the math doesn’t work out, they just deny the certificate of occupancy. There are ways around it. There are ways to figure out more parking spaces. For example, we’ve seen cases where just restriping the parking spots in an angle instead of straight.

Generated three more parking spots on the row, and sometimes that’s all it was needed. We’ve had situations where we created a shared parking agreement with the next door property. Obviously you’re gonna have to pay a little bit to the other property to do that allocation for you, but it’s doable and sometimes it’s worth the money.

We’ve seen cases where the City math was wrong just because they had a very old certificate of occupancy for a tenant that is no longer there, or a tenant that has been changed since, but never went and applied for the certificate of occupancy, which shouldn’t happen. But it’s reality and it’s human.

So things happen even though they shouldn’t. and we’ve seen cases where the planning person just did a wrong calculation. We’re all human. It happens, and we had to show them the math and make it work.

These are just a few tools we have in our belt. We do commercial property management. We deal with a lot of the cities around the metroplex, and we know how to handle that, and we know how to negotiate these things because sometimes just the way you explain what the business does helps the person on the City side understand and then put the right numbers in front of it instead of just looking at some matrix they created.

You have to remember. They don’t know every business. Those ordinance rules sometimes were written decades ago and do not apply to businesses that didn’t exist that many years ago. So that’s where we come in. That’s when we help. So, if you need help with managing your shopping center at the Dallas Fort Worth market, give us a call.

I’m Joseph Gozlan with Eureka Business Group. We’ll be happy to help.