The call comes in at 4:40 on a Thursday. A property manager has a tenant taking Suite 220, roughly 4,000 square feet on the second floor, and they want to be operating by the first of next month. Can somebody come out and take a look?
Every part of that sentence is a question you have not asked yet.
Tenant improvement work is where commercial electrical shops make good margin and also where they lose whole weeks to jobs that were never real. The site visit is cheap by itself. What is expensive is the two-hour walk, the takeoff, the proposal, the three follow-up calls, and then finding out the architect has not stamped anything and the building only permits noisy work between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m.
The first thing to establish is whose scope this is
On a TI job there are usually two payers and two scopes, and the caller often does not know which side of the line they are standing on.
The landlord's side is base building work: the service, the house panels, the meter arrangement, life safety, and whatever else the lease commits them to deliver. The tenant's side is everything inside the demised premises that supports the tenant's use, which on a typical fit-out is branch circuiting, lighting, receptacles, low voltage rough-in, and equipment connections.
The document that draws that line is the work letter attached to the lease, along with the tenant improvement allowance. Ask for it by name. If the caller is the tenant and has never heard of a work letter, that tells you the lease may not be signed, the allowance is unknown, and nobody has agreed who pays for the panel work you are about to price.
Then ask who signs your contract. A property manager calling on behalf of a tenant is a different customer than the tenant, and a general contractor holding the prime is a third arrangement. Payment terms, lien rights, and change order procedure all follow from that answer.
What the existing panel can actually give you
This is the question that most often turns a routine fit-out into a service upgrade, and it is worth pushing on while the caller is still on the line.
You want to know what feeds the space today. Is there a dedicated tenant panel inside the suite, or is it fed from a house panel in a shared electrical room? What is the panel's ampacity and voltage, 120/208 or 277/480, and is the service three phase? Is there a panel schedule taped inside the door, and is it current, or is it a photocopy from a tenant who moved out in 2011?
Then ask what the new tenant is bringing. A law office and a commercial kitchen occupy the same square footage very differently. Rooftop equipment, a walk-in cooler, a compressor, EV chargers in the garage, and a server closet all change the answer. If the tenant is adding meaningful load to an existing service, you need a load calculation the authority having jurisdiction will accept, and the utility may have to be in the conversation early if the service itself is short.
Spare capacity is the practical version of this: empty breaker spaces, available conduit in the walls and ceiling, and whether the existing feeder carries the new demand. If nobody on the phone knows, fine. Now you know the site visit includes opening a panel and reading a nameplate rather than eyeballing a floor plan.
Drawings and permit status tell you how real the project is
Ask what set of documents exists. There is a large difference between a hand sketch of where the tenant wants their desks, a space plan from a designer, and a permit set with an engineer's stamp on the electrical sheets.
If there is no stamped electrical drawing, someone has to produce one, and in most jurisdictions a commercial TI touching panels, circuiting, and life safety will not get a permit without it. Find out whether the tenant has engaged an engineer, whether the landlord requires their own engineer of record, and who pays for that work. If the answer is "we were hoping you would handle the drawings," that is a design build job with a different price and a different timeline. Say so on the call rather than in week three.
The permit questions are short. Has an application been submitted, to which jurisdiction, is it sitting in plan review, and who pulls the electrical permit, you or the GC? A caller who cannot answer those may still have a project, but the move-in date they just quoted you is fiction.
Hear it handled live. Answara's own AI receptionist answers our main line. Call (857) ANSWARA and ask it whatever a customer would ask you, or see plans and get set up.
Occupied space, labor rules, and the hours you are allowed to work
Three constraints tend to arrive late and hurt the most.
Occupied versus vacant. A vacant shell lets you run cable at noon with a lift in the middle of the floor. An occupied suite, or one beside occupied suites, means dust control, noise limits, protected finishes, escorts, and shutdowns that have to be scheduled and noticed to other tenants. Ask whether the floors above and below are occupied, and whether any planned shutdown touches shared equipment. A shutdown that kills a neighboring tenant's servers is a conversation to have before you bid.
Union and prevailing wage. Some buildings, some owners, and most public work carry labor requirements that decide whether you can bid at all. Ask whether a project labor agreement applies, whether the building requires union trades, and whether public funding is involved. Federally funded projects trigger Davis-Bacon wage requirements, and many states have their own prevailing wage statutes with certified payroll reporting attached. If your shop is open shop and the job is not, that answer just saved you a site visit.
After-hours windows. Building rules govern more than you would expect. Freight elevator reservations, badge or escort access, core drilling restricted to nights and weekends, a certificate of insurance naming the owner and the manager before anyone gets a key. Ask what the building's work hours are and whether your crew can be on site outside them. Night work is a labor rate, not a scheduling detail.
The question set
Run this on any inbound TI call, in roughly this order. It takes four minutes and it decides whether the site visit is worth booking.
- Building address, suite number, and approximate square footage.
- Who is calling: tenant, landlord, property manager, general contractor, or broker. Who will sign the contract and who pays.
- Is the lease signed, and is there a work letter and a tenant improvement allowance?
- What is the tenant's use, and what equipment are they bringing?
- What feeds the space now: dedicated panel or house panel, amperage, voltage, phase, spare breaker spaces?
- Is there a current panel schedule and any as-built drawings?
- What drawings exist today, and are the electrical sheets stamped?
- Permit status, jurisdiction, and who pulls it.
- Is the space vacant or occupied, and are neighboring suites occupied?
- Any required shutdowns, and what they affect.
- Union, project labor agreement, or prevailing wage requirements.
- Building work hours, after-hours rules, elevator and access procedure, COI requirements.
- Target completion date, and what is driving it.
- Are other electrical contractors bidding, and how many?
The last question is not rude. Being the fourth bidder on a job with a fixed allowance and an unstamped drawing set is a different use of your estimator than being one of two.
When to say no, or not yet
Some answers should end the call politely. No signed lease and no allowance means the project may not exist yet, and the right move is a calendar reminder rather than a truck. A union-only building when you are open shop is a hard stop. Everything else earns a site visit, and the questions above tell your estimator what to bring: a meter, a camera for the panel schedule, and a short list of things nobody on the phone could answer.
How an AI receptionist handles this call type
TI calls arrive while your crews are in ceilings and your estimator is on a rooftop. That is the whole problem with them. A property manager who reaches voicemail at 4:40 on Thursday usually calls the next contractor on the list rather than leaving a message.
An AI voice receptionist answers on the first ring and runs the same intake every time. It can capture the building address and suite, identify whether the caller is the tenant, the landlord, or a GC, ask about the panel and the drawing set in plain language, note permit status and building hours, and hand your estimator a structured record instead of a name and a number on a message slip. It can also route a caller who mentions a live outage or a failed inspection to a person immediately rather than treating it as a bid inquiry.
What it does not do is judge the job. It will not tell you whether the existing 200 amp panel carries the tenant's compressor, and it will not decide whether a prevailing wage requirement works for your shop. It collects the answers so a human can make that call the same day. More on how electrical contractors handle inbound call load is on our electrical resources hub.