Eight questions, weighted by how often each item turns up on a Bay Area correction list. You get a risk band plus the specific gaps a reviewer would most likely write up first.
Nothing here is a quote, a bid, an engineering determination or a boundary determination. We are a drafting and design firm: we coordinate with a licensed structural engineer and a Licensed Land Surveyor when your project needs one, rather than performing or stamping that work ourselves.
Read through a first-round comment list and very little of it turns out to be about the quality of the design. Most of it is about information that is absent, inconsistent, or true but never written down anywhere. Verification is the reviewer's job, and nothing can be verified from an undimensioned setback, a section that contradicts the plan it was cut from, or a header schedule with no calculation standing behind it. Those become comments regardless of how sound the thinking underneath them was.
At the counter, then, complete beats clever. What predicts a short correction list better than anything else is a set that agrees with itself: one dimension reading the same on the plan, the elevation and the section; the U-factor in the CF1R matching the one in the window schedule; the structural details describing the framing that is actually drawn. Reviewers tend to write up each discrepancy separately, and every write-up buys another cycle measured in weeks.
The second pattern is a set stitched together from three suppliers with nobody responsible for reconciling them — architectural from here, energy from there, structural from somewhere else. Reconciliation is a job, not an afterthought. We model in Revit, so plans, elevations and sections come out of one coordinated model instead of three drawings held in agreement by hand, and a permit set we assemble is treated as a single package rather than three stapled together the night before submittal.
The code is written at the state level; what you actually submit against is not. Each jurisdiction adds amendments, its own intake checklist, and in a number of Bay Area cities a reach code — electrification or all-electric rules that sit above the base energy code and land directly in the Title 24 CF1R. Elsewhere it shows up as a green-building or mandatory-measures sheet, a fire-access or defensible-space note, or an arborist or grading review that has to clear before the building set moves at all.
Intake behaves differently too. One department will hand a package back across the counter over a missing cover-sheet data block, before a reviewer ever opens it; the next accepts everything and mails a long comment list a month later. The end state is much the same, but the first tells you sooner. Downloading the current checklist for the specific city you are submitting to takes about fifteen minutes and regularly saves a full review cycle.
On stamps, to be exact about it: where calculations or a wet stamp are required, an independently licensed engineer performs and seals that work. We draw and coordinate the documents and bring that engineer in when the scope calls for it — see engineering and specialist coordination. We do not perform engineering and we do not stamp it. Anything turning on a property boundary or a certified elevation is a Licensed Land Surveyor's determination, and we coordinate one rather than making that call ourselves.
That is not what a low score means, and this tool will not pretend otherwise. Low means the items reviewers most commonly ask for are already in your set, which in practice correlates with a shorter comment list. The approval itself belongs to the building department and turns on local amendments, zoning interpretation and internal policy that no checklist sees coming. First-pass approval is not something anyone can promise you.
No, they are ordinary. Almost every submittal draws some comments, and a set that draws none is the exception rather than the target. What you are trying to avoid is the long list that sends the drawings back for a redraw and adds another multi-week review, not the short list you can answer in an afternoon.
At half weight, on the reasoning that an item nobody on the project can confirm is present is quite often an item that is missing or half-finished. The remedy is a review of the actual set: open the drawings, walk each item against your city's checklist, and close whatever is open before the package goes in rather than after.
Yes, correction responses are routine work here. We go through the comments, work out what the reviewer is actually after, revise or add whatever drawings and documents that requires, and put the resubmittal package together. Where comments call for calculations or a stamp, we bring in an independently licensed engineer to perform and seal that piece.
Common, especially on older properties and anywhere unpermitted work is involved. We scan the existing condition with Matterport and draft the as-builts from the scan, so what the reviewer compares your proposal against is a measured record rather than an educated guess.
Residential or commercial, drafting or Title 24 — send a few details and we'll follow up with next steps and a free quote.
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