The "Efficient Build"

This is a fancy way of saying “to build the cheapest park possible”. You can see in the photo across these are usually very basic metal construction that are built for your light industrial and sub-contractors. We recommend a lot of beginners to do a build like this for a few reasons, one is the cost to build, being on the cheaper side and 2, they are going to be more generic and appeal to a broader tenant pool of local companies that need small incubator spaces. The finish out is generally pretty standard, consisting of one small office and a restroom with the suite sizes generally ranging from 1,100 up 3,000 square feet. We don’t recommend going over 6,000 square foot spaces for a first project. Your tenant pool starts to shrink drastically after 4,00 square feet meaning to lease the space will generally take longer than something being say 1,100 – 3,000 square feet. 

The easiest way to make this layout is to build an A-Frame project and make the building a standard size for metal builders that usually looks like a 100 foot long by 60 feet deep. This is a building that can generally be broken down to 1,000 square foot units up to a single 6,000 square foot tenant. The reason I picked 6,000 square feet is because of many zoning and city code issues you will find which we will go over later in this book because every city is different and if you stay under the fire code, you can eliminate certain expenses in many cases like a fire sprinkler system which can take your cost to build through the roof.