In 2013, the City of San Francisco launched the “Mandatory Soft Story Retrofit” program as part of a multi-year initiative to retrofit older, more disaster prone buildings in San Francisco. Buildings are split into four tiers based on the relative urgency associated with the retrofitting work (e.g. Tier 1 includes buildings with educational, assembly or residential care uses). With the looming deadline for Tier 1 buildings to submit their plans to the city, we decided to take a closer look to see how the market was responding.

From 2000 – 2014, our classifier was able to identify 1,946 building permits in San Francisco referencing seismic retrofit work. Plotted over time, we see a clear jump in activity in 2014.

A break-down of permitting by property type, seems to be a good indicator that the City’s program is having an effect.

Apartments fall into ‘Tier 2″ of the city’s program (buildings containing 15 or more dwelling units). Although the Tier 2 deadline for permit application is September 2016, it would seem that a couple hundred buildings have jumped out ahead of the program.

To get a sense for the financial impact of this activity, we looked at the distribution of job valuations for seismic retrofit permits across the time series.

With a median valuation of $50k, the already increasing demand for seismic retrofit work bodes well for the contractors offering these services in the city.

Update (2/13/15) – We were asked to examine how the soft story program may influence pricing for seismic retrofitting, so we examined the price distribution for apartments in 2014 – the class of building most influenced by the policy. Interestingly enough, we saw the median job value drop to $40k (20% below the 15-year median for seismic retrofitting). This tempers the 128% year-over-year growth in total permits issued and would suggest that the change in total annual expenditure may be closer to 100%.

Here are the 10 most active seismic retrofitting contractors over the past 15 years (based on permits issued in San Francisco).

[box]If you’re interested in a seismic retrofit and would like some hiring advice, you can chat with our resident contractor by e-mailing him at andrew (at) buildzoom.com. If you’re interested in learning more about the data, you can contact me directly at jiyan (at) buildzoom.com. [/box]