Los Angeles ordinance compliance, voluntary upgrades, and seismic strengthening for residential, multi-family, and commercial buildings — engineered for performance and documented for the inspector.
Soft-story retrofit work is one of the cleanest engineering problems in California — the failure mode is well understood, the code path is established, and the solutions are well-proven. The difference between firms isn’t whether they know how to design a moment frame. It’s how cleanly they document it, how quickly plan check goes, and how few RFIs the contractor sends during construction.
That’s what we optimize for. Our retrofit packages clear LADBS without three rounds of corrections. The contractor knows where every connection lands. Tenants get back to normal sooner. The job is supposed to make the building safer — not turn the property owner’s year upside down.
An 18-unit, two-story tuck-under apartment building in West LA. Mandatory soft-story compliance with two steel moment frames, complete plan-check approval in one round, construction completed without tenant displacement.
View projectIf your building is on LADBS’s mandatory soft-story list, yes — you’ve received notice and there’s a compliance deadline. Voluntary retrofits are optional but increasingly required by lenders and insurance carriers.
Engineering is typically a small fraction of total project cost. Pricing depends on building size, number of stories, complexity, and whether construction documents already exist. We provide a fixed-fee proposal after a site visit.
4–8 weeks from kickoff to permit-ready plans for a typical 4–20 unit building. We share a realistic timeline at proposal and stick to it.
Usually no. Most retrofit work happens in accessible areas — garages, ground-floor parking — and we design with construction sequencing in mind to minimize disruption.
You bid the work to licensed retrofit contractors. We stay available during construction for RFIs, field changes, and inspector coordination — no extra fee for reasonable construction-phase support.