Warehouse lease for dog boarding and the zoning call that nearly killed the deal

Nate Harrison· Dog daycare and boarding; name picked, negotiating a warehouse lease· Named it, Pet Services·Aug 4

Name picked, LLC done, and I have spent six weeks on a warehouse I may not be allowed to use. Lesson learned: I found the building before I called the city.

The unit is 4,800 square feet in a light industrial strip, $4,100 a month, five-year term, and the landlord wants a personal guarantee on the whole thing. Zoning is where it got interesting. Boarding reads as a kennel use in my city, which needs a conditional use permit, which needs a hearing, which is six to ten weeks and the neighbors get to speak. There is an apartment building across the lot line, so noise will come up and I do not have a good answer beyond insulation and no outdoor runs after 7pm.

Then the build-out. The floor needs sealing and sloping to a drain, and the existing drain goes somewhere the landlord cannot document. His position is that anything touching the slab is my expense. My contractor's rough number for floor, drainage and enough HVAC for forty dogs is around $60,000, which is more than I had budgeted for everything.

Walk away and find a space already permitted for animal use?
Spend $60k of borrowed money on a building I do not own, on a five-year lease?

Has anyone here actually negotiated a landlord into paying for slab work, or is that fantasy?

3 replies

Lena Kaminski· Open·Aug 4

I went mobile partly to avoid this exact conversation, so take that as bias. But the drain is the part I would push hardest on. If the landlord cannot document where it goes, that is not just your cost, it is your liability the first time someone asks what is going into it. I had to answer that question about my own waste tank and I only carry a hundred gallons.

Before you spend a dollar on the hearing, can you find out whether the previous tenant's use was ever inspected? If the building has an unresolved history, you are inheriting it either way.

Nate Harrison· Named it·Aug 5

I asked, and the answer was vague enough to be a red flag. Previous tenant did cabinet assembly, so the drain was probably never anything but a floor rinse, but nobody has paperwork. My contractor suggested a camera scope before I sign anything, about $400, which feels like the cheapest money in this whole process.

The neighbors are still the thing I cannot model. I can insulate, I can promise no outdoor runs at night, and one person with a grievance can still stretch a hearing out for months while I am paying rent.

Rob Mackenzie· Open·Aug 5

A personal guarantee on five years at $4,100 with a conditional use permit you do not have yet is the part I would be fighting, not the slab. Do not sign anything without a zoning contingency that lets you walk with your deposit if the permit is denied. I signed one lease without that clause and it cost me eleven months of rent on a building I never opened.

On the slab: landlords will sometimes fund it as a tenant improvement allowance amortised into the rent. You are not asking him for a gift, you are asking him to lend it to you at a rent premium. That framing gets a yes more often.

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