SB 721 Compliance & Balcony Repair for San Bruno Commercial Properties

$400-$800 per building for a 3-8 unit property. Two things move it here. Where you are in the city - a hillside building in the wind is a different exercise from a flat one by El Camino - and whether the doors and windows have been worked on before, because that changes what we are looking at rather than just how much of it there is. The site visit that establishes both is free.

It is one of the first things we ask about in this city, and most owners have never connected it to anything. SFO has been running an aircraft noise insulation programme since 1983 and it has treated thousands of properties in the communities around the airport, San Bruno among them. The work is real and it does what it was meant to do. But it was designed by acousticians to stop sound, and sound and water are not stopped by the same details. A balcony door threshold is precisely the sort of assembly such a programme replaces - and a threshold that is beautifully sealed against noise is not automatically flashed, pan-detailed and drained against water. On top of that, tightening an envelope changes how it dries: a 1950s building that was slightly leaky and slightly breathable, then sealed, holds what gets in for longer than its original detailing assumed. None of that is an accusation against anybody. It is simply a question worth asking about your own building: what was done, when, and did anyone look at the water afterwards. Usually the answer is no, because that was not the job.

Both, and how it goes depends entirely on how the report is written. San Bruno has two substantial complexes - Shelter Creek in the hills and Peninsula Place lower down - and at that scale the inspection is the straightforward half. The hard half is that a single very large number put in front of a membership does not get voted through; it gets postponed, and then it gets bigger. The size also helps, though, and genuinely: on a complex where the same detail repeats across hundreds of units, a properly selected sample tells you something real about the rest rather than being a hopeful guess, and one mobilisation covers ground that would take five on scattered small buildings. We sample across elevations and elevations of exposure, then stage the findings into what must happen this year and what can be sequenced. That is a document a board can act on.

More than the year on your permit does. This is a city of 5.5 square miles containing about 700 feet of vertical - from roughly 41 feet at City Hall up past 700 in the hills behind Crestmoor and Rollingwood. The upper neighbourhoods are windy, foggy and cold; the flat side by El Camino and the airport is not. Same owner, same builder, same year, two miles apart, and the hillside building will be further along than the flat one. We have had owners genuinely surprised that we quoted their four buildings differently. They should be quoted differently. They are not the same building.

Ownership structure decides it, not the building. HOA-governed condominiums are SB 326, nine-year cycle. Non-HOA rental buildings of three or more units are SB 721, six-year cycle. San Bruno has an unusually high share of the first, because the two large complexes account for a lot of units in a city of about 44,000 - which means a lot of this city's compliance runs through association boards rather than individual owners, on a nine-year clock rather than a six-year one. A detached single-family association with no elevated elements is outside both. We'll tell you which of the three you are before you spend anything.

Callback the same business day, on-site within 48 hours. San Bruno is 106 miles from our North Highlands yard, so we are straight that we are not the crew for something in the next hour. We schedule the airport corridor in blocks and bring the full crew and materials in one mobilisation, which on a large association property is the only sensible way to do it anyway. Genuine safety issues we move on immediately regardless.