Commercial Inspections & Thermal Imaging Services in Contra Costa County

Office Being Torn Down, Retail Being Bought

Contra Costa is a suburban office and retail county with a heavy-industrial waterfront, and in 2026 those three pieces are moving in different directions. North I-680 office, from Walnut Creek through Pleasant Hill, Concord and Martinez, was 24.8% vacant in the second quarter, with Pleasant Hill BART around 40% and Concord above 32%. Eleven buildings at Walnut Creek Executive Park, some 374,000 square feet, were taken out of the inventory for demolition and housing. At Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, where Class A vacancy was 27.4% at the end of 2025, owners are converting office to residential and mixed use.

Retail is the opposite story. Downtown Walnut Creek remains one of the strongest suburban retail districts in the region, and the county produced the East Bay's largest retail sales of the second quarter: Gateway Centre in San Ramon for $47.8 million, and a Trader Joe's property in downtown Walnut Creek at about $815 per square foot. East County is where new retail is still being built.

Meanwhile the Richmond–Rodeo–Martinez shoreline holds the county's most specialized industrial stock, around 18 million square feet in Richmond alone, alongside a decades-long redevelopment of the former Concord Naval Weapons Station that took a step forward this September when the Navy approved the financial term sheet for the land transfer.

Each of those is a different kind of transaction and a different kind of commercial inspection: an office building priced on whether it has a future as an office, a retail center priced on its tenants and its roof, an industrial parcel priced on its history.

Thermal Imaging in Contra Costa County

Thermal imaging shows what a visual inspection cannot: wet insulation under a roof membrane, a breaker or bus connection running hot, an empty cell in a block wall. A thermal camera reads surface temperature, so each of those shows up as a temperature difference you cannot see by eye. In Contra Costa every scan is performed and interpreted by our Infraspection Institute Certified Level III Thermographer, who is also a CCPIA Certified Commercial Property Inspector, so the images come with an inspector's reading of what they mean.

The county's tilt-up and block buildings call for an infrared CMU wall inspection, which finds missing grout and trapped moisture without opening the wall. The heavy electrical loads along the industrial shoreline in Richmond and Martinez, and in older office buildings changing hands, are a good fit for electrical thermography under NFPA 70B, done with the equipment energized and running. And summer heat in Central and East County gives strong thermal loading for an infrared roof survey on the large roofs over retail centers, office buildings along I-680 and warehouses from Concord to Pittsburg, Antioch and Brentwood, flown by drone and confirmed with impedance testing.

For the office buildings along I-680 that are changing hands, envelope and insulation scans show where air and water get in and where energy is being lost, which feeds directly into the repositioning budget. Where a heating or hot water line is suspected of leaking under a slab, infrared narrows the search to one targeted opening instead of exploratory demolition. See all of our commercial infrared inspections.