Plumbing for Property Managers and Retail Centers

The lease decides most of it. Many retail and office leases make the tenant responsible for plumbing inside the suite and leave the landlord with anything shared: the water service, the building sewer, roof drains and common restrooms. Some triple-net leases push nearly everything to tenants. Read the maintenance and repair clause before the first backup, not during it. Here's how tenant vs landlord plumbing responsibility usually shakes out.

The city doesn't read your lease, though. When Phoenix enforces a rule, it goes to whoever the code names, and for shared systems that's often the owner.

Food court or a strip center with two restaurants on one outdoor interceptor? In Phoenix, maintaining an interceptor is the user's job, but a multiple-user interceptor is the property owner's. The owner schedules the pumping, keeps three years of invoices and service records on site, and answers the inspector. Most owners bill the cost back through CAM or the lease; the compliance duty stays put.

Two things make shared interceptors go wrong: nobody watches the schedule because each tenant assumes another one does, and a new food tenant adds fixtures without anyone checking whether the interceptor is still big enough. Our grease interceptor sizing calculator runs the Phoenix and Chandler numbers, and the printable maintenance log keeps one record for the whole property.

Phoenix lists retail shopping centers, strip malls, and retail or industrial shell buildings where one water service supplies more than one tenant among the facilities that need a reduced pressure (RP) backflow assembly. Each assembly gets tested at least once a year by a certified tester, with the results filed with the city and the records kept three years. Other Valley cities run their own programs and send their own notices, and some shut off water when a test is missed. Here's what commercial backflow testing in Arizona involves.

The building sewer for a retail center often runs under the parking lot, collects several suites and leaves the property under a street or alley. In Phoenix, Code 28-5.1 puts repair of that whole line on the owner, including a broken section off the property, and requires a city permit for the work in the street. A camera inspection before you buy, refinance or re-tenant a food space tells you where the roots, sags and broken joints are. Here's who is responsible for the sewer line in Phoenix.

An empty suite is the classic source of a sewer smell that drifts into the tenant next door. Water in a trap is what blocks sewer gas, and it evaporates fast in a Phoenix summer when nobody runs the sinks or mops the floor drains. Pour water into every floor drain and fixture in vacant suites on a schedule, or have trap primers installed. If the smell stays, the cause may be a cracked vent or a failed wax ring. See sewer gas smell in a commercial building.

New tenants mean new sinks, restrooms and sometimes a kitchen. In Phoenix, remodels, tenant improvements and changes of use go through commercial plan review, and grease interceptors and backflow assemblies get their own look. A retail suite that becomes a restaurant almost always needs a grease interceptor sized for the new fixture count. See commercial tenant improvement plumbing and the Phoenix TI permit page.

If you keep a maintenance staff, Phoenix also lets owners who regularly employ qualified tradespeople get an annual permit for routine plumbing and gas alterations, as long as they keep a detailed record of the work. Details are on our Phoenix annual permit page.

We work across the Valley for owners and managers with one or many properties: tenant calls, shared interceptor service, backflow assembly replacements, sewer camera inspections, jetting, water heaters and planned shutoffs. You get an upfront price before work starts, 24/7 emergency service, and invoices that name the property and suite so costs land on the right tenant. Here's the play: one number for every building, and paperwork your accountant can use.