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Demox

Miami-Dade County

Commercial Demolition

Retail, office, restaurant and warehouse space taken back to a leasable shell.

Who usually calls

A landlord or a GC on a turnaround clock. The buyer cares about schedule certainty and about working nights.

Commercial demolition is almost always strip-out to a leasable shell, and the client is usually a landlord between tenants or a tenant with a fit-out date. The measure of the job is what the next tenant's contractor can start on, and when.

The constraints are the building and the lease rather than the structure. Other tenants keep trading, the loading dock is shared, the life-safety systems stay live, and the landlord has a view on what the shell means: whether the ceiling grid stays, whether the sprinkler drops are capped or removed, where the electrical is left. Those are three different prices and they are settled on the walk-through, in writing.

Restaurants and medical space carry their own surprises. Grease ducts, interceptors, walk-in slabs, lead-lined partitions and anything with a refrigerant in it each have a disposal route of their own, and finding one mid-demolition stops the programme.

Licensing, plainly

This scope is licensed contracting in Florida, and ISP GROUP LLC does not hold that licence today. So we are not offering to perform it and you should not read this page as a bid for it. What is written here is what the work involves and what the county requires, which is true whoever does it.

What we can do now: walk the site, scope and document the work, handle the survey, the notification and the permit paperwork, bring in a licensed contractor who contracts that part directly with you, and do the clearance, haulage and disposal ourselves. When you take bids, ask every contractor for a licence number and verify it on the issuing register.

Night strip-out of a retail unit, work lights, ceiling grid coming down in sections.
Night strip-out of a retail unit, work lights, ceiling grid coming down in sections. Generated footage, not a job of ours and not a recording of one. It shows what the scope looks like. Our own work goes up as clients release it.

Scope

What is in the job.

Included

  • Protection of the common parts and the route, to the landlord's standard
  • Partitions, ceilings, finishes, joinery and tenant equipment out
  • Mechanical, electrical and plumbing disconnected and stripped to the agreed point, capped and labelled
  • Life-safety kept live or formally isolated with the building's agreement, never quietly
  • Debris separated, hauled and disposed, out of hours where the building requires it
  • Shell handed over swept, openings secured, photographed against the agreed definition
Night strip-out of a retail unit, work lights, ceiling grid coming down in sections.
Licensed stock photograph of the same kind of work.

What moves the price

We do not publish a rate for this, because a number given without seeing the site is either useless or untrue. These are the things that decide it.

  • The definition of shell. Capping sprinkler drops and removing them are different jobs
  • Hours. Night and weekend work is the norm in an occupied building and it prices accordingly
  • The previous use. A restaurant or a clinic carries disposal routes a shop does not
  • Shared access. One dock and one lift across several trades sets the pace
  • Structural openings, which need an engineer and a different permit line

Permits

Where this scope sits with the county.

Commercial strip-out is permitted work once it touches structure or the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, and the building's own approval usually runs alongside the county's. Miami-Dade requires an asbestos survey before demolition regardless of the year the building went up, and the federal NESHAP notification runs ten working days from a correctly filed notice. That clock runs in parallel with everything else, so it is filed first, not last.

Have this ready

  • The lease's make-good or reinstatement clause, which often decides the scope outright
  • The landlord's written definition of shell condition
  • Building rules: hours, dock, lift, insurance wording
  • As-built drawings if they exist, and the previous tenant's fit-out drawings if they do not

None of it is required to get a visit booked. All of it makes the number firmer and the date earlier.

The full permit sequence, with sources, is on the permits and asbestos page.

Questions

What people ask about commercial demolition.

Can the work happen at night?

In most occupied buildings it has to. It is a real cost difference rather than a scheduling preference, and it should be priced that way from the start.

Who decides what shell condition means?

The lease, and after that the landlord. Get it in writing before the estimate, because the gap between two readings of the same clause can be a third of the price.

What about the sprinklers and the fire alarm?

They stay live unless the building formally agrees an isolation with the fire authority's requirements met. Nobody should be cutting a live system quietly, and a contractor who offers to is telling you something.

Usually bundled with