Flex-space construction in Utah County
Flex space is a shell building split into demisable bays, each with a finished office front and an open warehouse back behind a grade-level door. Grandview builds flex buildings for developers and owner-users across Utah County and the Salt Lake Valley under Utah DOPL B100 license #14282236-5501.
When flex space beats a plain warehouse
Build flex when you don’t yet know who the tenants are. A distribution center is designed around one operation: 32-foot-plus clear, dock-high doors, truck courts. A light manufacturing facility is designed around one equipment layout. Flex space is designed around a leasing plan. Bays of 2,000 to 10,000 square feet, 18 to 24 feet clear, grade-level roll-up doors, and a storefront front elevation let a cabinet shop, an HVAC contractor, and a physical therapy clinic all lease in the same building.
It also fits owner-users who occupy two or three bays and lease the rest. The tradeoff is cost per square foot: every demising wall, storefront section, restroom rough-in, and separate meter adds money a single-tenant warehouse never spends. If one tenant will fill the whole building, a plain shell from our warehouse and industrial practice is the cheaper answer.
What goes into a flex building
The shell can be tilt-up concrete or a pre-engineered metal building with a masonry or storefront front wall. Below 40,000 square feet, PEMB usually pencils best; above that, tilt-up gets competitive. What makes the building flex is everything decided before the shell goes up.
- Set the bay module. Column spacing, door spacing, and storefront mullions land on one repeating dimension, typically 25 to 30 feet, so every bay size is a multiple of the same module. Pick it wrong and the building only splits one way.
- Design demising walls to move. Walls between bays are one-hour rated assemblies, usually metal stud or CMU, run to the roof deck. We locate future demising lines on the plan and keep roof purlins and sprinkler branch lines clear of them, so a wall can be added or removed later without reworking the structure overhead.
- Stub every bay. Each bay gets water and sewer stubs for a restroom, its own electrical meter base, a gas stub, and a roof curb for a packaged rooftop unit. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and fire sprinklers are performed by licensed trade partners under our contract; we coordinate, sequence, and quality-check their work within your project. Flex is where that coordination earns its keep, because systems are drawn per bay, not per building. We see dependencies before they become delays.
- Finish the front, leave the back. Office fronts go to a vanilla shell (insulated walls, glazing, a restroom, lighting); the warehouse half stays open with a sealed slab. Tenant-specific work happens later as tenant improvements.
- Plan the mezzanine now. A 20-to-24-foot clear bay has room for a partial mezzanine over the office front. Designing the slab and column loads for a future steel mezzanine on day one costs little; adding one later is a structural project.
Utah details that change a flex building
Grade-level doors are the weak point of flex space here. Every bay has a 12-by-14 roll-up door opening onto an apron that sees forklifts, box trucks, and roughly a hundred-plus freeze–thaw days a year. We pour those aprons with air-entrained concrete, thickened thresholds, and joints laid out so the slab cracks where we tell it to, not across the doorway.
The slab usually sits on the lakebed clays or bench soils the Utah Geological Survey maps as expansive or collapsible. A flex slab carries rack loads in one bay and a showroom floor in the next, so the geotechnical report sets subgrade prep and slab thickness for the heaviest plausible tenant, not the lightest.
Seismic design on the Wasatch fault shapes the demising walls too: full-height rated walls need anchorage at the roof deck and out-of-plane bracing under current Utah-adopted code. And in fast-growth Lehi, Saratoga Springs, and Eagle Mountain, most flex projects sit inside business parks with their own design committees. Storefront finish, roof screens, and signage answer to the park’s CC&Rs on top of city review, so we schedule both.
What drives the cost of flex space in Utah
As ballpark planning numbers, flex shells along the Wasatch Front commonly land around $130–190 per square foot, with the office fronts costing more than the warehouse behind them. Four things move the number most: the ratio of office to warehouse, the number of bays (each demising wall and utility stub is a line item), the shell system, and the site. Over-excavation, a long power extension, or storm detention on a tight lot can cost as much as several bays’ worth of walls. We give a project-specific budget range after seeing the site and the leasing plan, not before.
Questions we actually get
How small can a flex bay be?
Around 1,500 to 2,000 square feet is the practical floor. Below that, the restroom, storefront, and door eat too much of the bay to leave usable warehouse behind them. A 25-foot module lets you combine bays for the occasional larger tenant.
Can I add or remove demising walls after the building is done?
Yes, if the building was designed for it. We keep roof framing, sprinkler branch lines, and rooftop unit curbs clear of planned demising lines and stub utilities per bay, so combining or splitting bays is a permitted tenant-improvement project, not structural work. Buildings that skipped that planning pay for it on every lease turnover.
What clear height should a flex building have?
Eighteen to 24 feet clear covers most flex tenants. Higher adds shell cost without adding rent for small-bay users; lower than 18 rules out a mezzanine and most trade contractors who stack material. If your market study points toward larger logistics users, you’re describing a distribution building, and we’ll say so.
Does a flex building need fire sprinklers?
Almost always, given the sizes involved. Hazard classification depends on bay size, demising-wall rating, and what tenants may store, so the leasing rules and the sprinkler design get written together. Fire suppression is performed by licensed trade partners under our contract, and the classification is confirmed with the city fire marshal during permit review.
Tell us about the building you’re planning
We reply within a couple of hours during business hours, a day at most. You’ll get a straight read on bay layout, shell system, and budget before anyone commits to anything. Grandview is a licensed and insured Utah general contractor, verifiable at dopl.utah.gov, and part of our broader new construction practice.