Another successful Expedio Refurb

Industrial property renewal and renovation is Expedio’s bread and butter. Our philosophy is to always leave a building in a better state that we found it. More often than not, we leave a building not just renovated, but transformed into premises that will serve the market for another 30-40 years.

Having accumulated years of experience in this field, we believe that we understand the needs of industrial tenants and occupiers fairly well.

In our most recent project, a refurbishment of a small 1980s unit in Manukau, we identified a number of factors that contribute to turning an older under maintained building into a modern and highly usable building.

During the course of our work, we start with the “unseen” services, predominantly power and plumbing. Typical users and business operators don’t have the time, inclination or desire to worry about whether their office sockets will electrocute them, or if the pipes are going to burst and soak the downstairs carpet. Therefore our first objective it to make the building safe.

In this case we removed all the old electrics and fuse board, and replaced them with modern circuitry and fittings. LED lights and roller door motors save money, maintenance costs and wear and tear. These savings accumulate for occupiers over the long term. To modernise the plumbing we removed old style pipe work that is known to degrade over time and replaced it with new. During the course of their lifetime plumbing fittings and hardware need to withstand a lot of use, so we opted for quality fittings suitable to the environment.

Having completed this basic work, we moved on to facets that most users will care about each day. The old pockmarked warehouse floor was resurfaced and renewed, making it smooth and easy to work on. Similarly, we carpeted the offices with a good quality industrial carpet and tiled all the wet areas. Here we have taken into account the aesthetic and installed floor coverings that are easy to keep clean and easy to maintain.

This particular unit had some unconsented work, which we removed. While the original design was sound, other additions had been made over the years. We often find that additions like this (maybe a bedroom in this case?) serve one occupant, but none of the subsequent occupiers. For example; Buildings morph and change over years of use, as economies grow. Where businesses in the past were often heavily staffed and buildings were modified to suit, we now see a trend towards very low office to warehouse ratios. Thus the removal of extra office space often comprises a lot of the work we undertake. Here, we reverted the design back to the original mezzanine floor and renewed the structure.

Finally, a fresh coat of paint inside and out using a contemporary colour scheme added the finishing touches to the job.

Obviously all of this work doesn’t come cheap. One might even argue that to spend $10,000 resurfacing a floor or spending $5,000 to replace a roller door, when the existing “would do”, might be seen as a waste of money. However, contrary to this belief, we understand that there are hidden costs of having an undesirable or substandard building. These costs can be borne out in protracted vacancy times, ongoing and expensive maintenance, reduced (or discounted) rental or sales rates and ultimately unhappy tenants or purchasers.

Having successfully completed this project we can now offer the final result – a renewed and rejuvenated structure that we can confidently expect to serve the industrial market for another 30 years.