Reading a site before you sign the lease

The most expensive mistakes in this industry are made at the property stage, and they are almost always made quickly. A warehouse comes up, the rent looks good, the floor area is generous, and someone signs before anyone has stood inside it with a laser measure and a purpose.

Court venues are unusually demanding buildings. They need height, clear span, a specific kind of floor, a lot of parking at exactly the wrong times of day for a suburban street, and an acoustic profile that will not have neighbours writing to council. Most industrial and retail stock fails at least one of these, and a site can fail on a single measurement.

Here is the order we work through.

Clear height, measured to the lowest obstruction

Height is the first and most brutal filter, and it is where the majority of sites die.

The number that matters is not the ridge height on the plan. It is the clear height under the lowest thing that hangs down anywhere over a court, which in a typical warehouse means sprinkler heads, ductwork, lighting, cable trays, roller door tracks and the underside of a portal frame haunch at the edge of the span. The haunch is the one that catches people out, because it sits precisely where you would like to put the back of a court.

Every sport has its own requirement, and a multi-sport venue is governed by the most demanding one you intend to put in the building. Measure at several points across the floor, not just the middle, and measure to the obstruction rather than to the roof sheet.

The column grid

Courts are rigid rectangles with mandatory run-off around them. Columns are not negotiable in an existing building. The question is whether your court layout can be threaded between the ones that exist.

We lay courts over the real column grid before forming a view on a site, including the run-off and the circulation, because a grid that is a metre out in the wrong direction can cost a whole court. On a six court concept, losing one court is not a design annoyance, it is a change to the revenue model that may take the site below the break-even court hours you calculated at feasibility.

This is also where multi-sport gets interesting. A grid that will not take an extra padel court may comfortably take pickleball courts in the same footprint, which can be a better answer than walking away.

Floor and slab

Different sports want different things underfoot, and retrofitting a slab is one of the more painful line items in this business.

Check the slab condition, the flatness and the fall, whether there are pits, trenches, drainage runs or old machine bases under the surface, and what the slab was designed to carry. On outdoor or partially covered sites the questions become drainage, subgrade and whether the ground moves. Padel courts in particular sit on a structure that has to be dead flat and stay that way, and correcting a floor after the courts arrive is not a small job.

Ask for the original structural drawings. If they do not exist, price a survey and treat that cost as part of the site assessment rather than a surprise.

Parking, and the hour it is actually needed

Court venues have a parking profile that no other tenancy in an industrial estate shares. Your peak is weekday evenings and weekend mornings, when the neighbouring units are shut and the street is empty. That sounds convenient, and it is, until you discover that the shared parking you were counting on is under someone else’s exclusive lease, or that council assesses your parking requirement on floor area rather than on how a court venue actually operates.

Count the spaces you control, in writing, not the spaces you can see. Then count how many cars arrive when four courts change over at once, because everyone leaves and arrives in the same ten minutes. Changeover, not average occupancy, is what fills a car park and what generates complaints.

Access, visibility and the last hundred metres

Players will forgive an unglamorous building. They will not forgive not being able to find the door at night, a dark walk from the car, or a driveway they cannot turn into safely.

Walk the approach after dark. Check the turning movements for a car towing nothing and for a delivery truck bringing courts in. Check whether the site is visible from a road that carries the traffic you want, because passing visibility does real work in the first year of a new sport in a new suburb.

Neighbours and acoustics

Padel and pickleball both make a distinctive, repetitive impact sound. In an industrial estate at 8pm this is usually a non-issue. Backing onto residential, it is the single most likely source of objection during approvals and complaint after opening.

Identify the nearest sensitive receiver before you sign, not after. Where residences are close, get an acoustic view early enough that it can shape the building, because barriers, orientation, court placement and enclosure are cheap decisions on a drawing and expensive ones once built.

Services and power

Lighting a court venue to a decent standard, plus any climate control, plus food and beverage, adds up to a meaningful electrical load. Check the existing supply and, critically, what an upgrade would cost and how long the network operator says it will take. Lead times on supply upgrades have derailed more openings than any construction delay we have seen.

Zoning and permitted use

Last, and it should be first for anything that looks marginal: confirm what the planning instrument allows, whether a recreation facility is permissible in that zone, and what a change of use triggers. A site can be perfect in every physical respect and still be the wrong answer because the use is prohibited or the approval pathway is longer than the deal can survive.

The honest version

Not many buildings pass all of this. That is the point. A site assessment that never says no is not an assessment, and the value in doing this properly is not the site you find, it is the twelve months you do not spend on the site you were about to sign.