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The Franklin Office You Signed For Before Counting the Bathrooms The space checked every box you cared about on the tour. Good frontage off Columbia Ave...
The space checked every box you cared about on the tour. Good frontage off Columbia Avenue, natural light coming in from the east, enough square footage for the desks you have now plus the two hires you're planning. Then week one arrives, you've got eleven people settling in, and you realize the whole floor shares a single restroom that was clearly built for a much smaller crowd. Nobody thinks about bathrooms during a walkthrough. Everybody thinks about them by 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
This is the part of commercial leasing that doesn't show up in a listing's hero photo, and it's exactly where a lot of otherwise sharp business owners get tripped up. Not because they were careless. Because the lease terms, the square footage, and the location genuinely deserve most of your attention, and the fixture count feels like something you'll sort out later. Then later arrives.
A commercial walkthrough is built to sell you on the space's best qualities. The agent showing it wants you to picture your business thriving there, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the tour moves at the pace of a conversation, and conversations don't naturally pause on the utility questions. You're talking about lease length and buildout allowances while you're standing in the very room where the plumbing capacity matters, and the plumbing never comes up.
So you have to bring the questions yourself. How many restrooms, and what's the fixture count in each? Are they compliant with current accessibility requirements for the number of people you'll have on site? Because a space that technically has a bathroom and a space that comfortably serves a full team are two different things, and the gap between them can mean a buildout you didn't budget for.
The number of required fixtures is often tied to occupancy and building code, and it's worth understanding the baseline before you assume the existing setup will work. The U.S. Access Board's guidance on accessible restrooms is a solid starting point for what compliant facilities actually require, and it's the kind of thing that's much cheaper to check before you sign than to discover after.
Restrooms are the headline, but they're not alone. There's a whole category of commercial-space realities that don't announce themselves on a tour, and every one of them can affect whether the space actually works for how you operate.
None of these show up in the light coming through the east windows. All of them show up in month two.
Here's the thing we keep coming back to at Redbird. The bathroom problem isn't a bathroom problem. It's a symptom of touring a space without a framework for what actually determines whether it fits. When you walk in with a checklist that goes past the emotional stuff (the light, the frontage, the feel) and into the operational stuff (fixtures, capacity, CAM, signage, expansion room), the space either holds up or it doesn't, and you find out before you're locked into a five-year term.
That framework is most of what tenant representation is. When we walk a Franklin commercial space with a client, we're not just admiring the exposed brick off Fourth Avenue. We're asking how many people you'll have here in year three, whether the restroom situation supports that, what the CAM history looks like, and whether the landlord is going to be reasonable about the buildout you'll need to make the space genuinely work. The tour is where most people fall in love. Our job is to make sure the space earns it.
The most useful move is boring and it works: map your real operational needs onto the space before the lease, not after. Bring your current headcount and your honest twelve-to-thirty-six-month growth plan. Count the restrooms and pressure-test whether they serve that number. Walk the parking at the hour your business is busiest, not at 10 a.m. on a quiet weekday. Ask for the CAM history, not the CAM estimate. Ask what buildout the landlord will contribute to and what falls on you.
And bring someone who negotiates these terms for a living, because a landlord's lease is written to protect the landlord, and that's exactly as it should be. Tenant representation exists to even that out. In Franklin's commercial market this summer, where good space near downtown and along the busier corridors moves and demand stays real, having someone in your corner who's read a hundred of these leases is the difference between a space that fits and a space you're quietly working around for years.
The office with the great light is worth signing for. Just count the bathrooms first. And the parking, and the CAM charges, and the electrical panel, and every other quiet thing that decides whether a good space becomes a good decision. That's the part we're here for.