Request a Proposal (707) 387-1936

Tell us the address and what the transaction needs, and we will do some research and send a proposal. Calls are returned within one business day.

Solano's Industrial Base Is Changing Hands

Inside about fourteen months, Solano County lost three of its anchor industrial employers. The Mare Island Dry Dock in Vallejo closed permanently in January 2026. The Anheuser-Busch brewery in Fairfield, a 170-acre plant that had run since 1976, shut down that February and went to market. In April, Valero stopped refining at Benicia after roughly sixty years, taking a site that accounted for close to nine percent of California's crude capacity out of operation.

Underneath those headlines, the Napa–Solano industrial market has recorded negative net absorption for two straight years, 1.57 million square feet in 2025 after 1.45 million in 2024, with rents softening and landlord concessions expected to widen. The county's office market has held up better, led by healthcare and government tenants.

All of which means buildings here are changing hands, being re-tenanted, subdivided, repositioned, or carried by an owner who now has to justify capital spending against falling rents. Those are precisely the moments when somebody needs to know what a building actually costs before signing, and precisely the moments a commercial inspection is worth commissioning.

Fairfield and Suisun City

The geographic center of the county and of the I-80 corridor, anchored by Travis Air Force Base, which remains Solano's largest single employer. The vacated 170-acre brewery site on Busch Drive is the most visible repositioning opportunity in the county, with high-capacity water, power and rail infrastructure the city is actively working to place. Office leasing here has been led by healthcare, with NorthBay Health purchasing a 73,728 square foot building on Campus Lane in 2025 and Sutter re-occupying space on Business Center Drive.

Much of the distribution and light industrial stock here sits under very large low-slope roofs that are well suited to an infrared roof survey, and carries heavy electrical loads worth an NFPA 70B electrical thermography scan. On a repositioning, a property condition assessment and a cost-to-remedy report turn the building's condition into numbers.

Suisun City has an active logistics-center project and is the annexation vehicle for the proposed California Forever development. That project is worth understanding if you are buying land here, but as of yet nothing has been approved and nothing has been built. A draft environmental impact report, a city council vote, a Solano LAFCO review and near-certain litigation all sit between the proposal and any ground being broken.

Vallejo and Mare Island

The county's oldest and most complicated commercial stock. Mare Island was the first United States naval base on the West Coast, transferred out of federal ownership under an early-transfer agreement with environmental remediation still ongoing, and it carries a history that includes residual contamination and unexploded ordinance. The Mare Island Specific Plan and its environmental impact report are in progress, with the full package anticipated around 2027.

Two practical consequences for a buyer. Congress earmarked $1.09 million in the 2026 federal budget specifically for sewer infrastructure repair on the island, which tells you something about the state of the wastewater system and makes a sewer lateral and vent stack inspection a concrete concern rather than a box to tick. And in the Downtown Waterfront District, the former PG&E manufactured gas plant and former Kaiser Steel property are named brownfield sites the city has been soliciting environmental professionals to assess, and a Phase 1 ESA is the place to start on anything near them.

Downtown Vallejo also has the county's only mandatory unreinforced masonry retrofit requirement, which matters more than most listing packages let on. A commercial inspection documents the visible evidence of a retrofit and the condition of the masonry, and older downtown storefronts often carry accessibility exposure worth an ADA accessibility inspection.

Benicia

Two very different inventories in one small city. The Industrial Park holds the county's heavier industrial and manufacturing stock, and the refinery's shutdown in April 2026 reshapes both the parcel market and the environmental-history conversation for anything nearby. Downtown, by contrast, is 1800s brick: Benicia was California's first state capital, and the masonry stock reflects it.

For anything in or adjacent to the industrial park, prior use is the question that matters. Fuel storage, solvents, process chemicals and decades of heavy operations leave histories that do not appear in a listing package, which is where Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessment work comes in. Downtown, relevant issues are masonry condition, seismic vulnerability and accessibility once a tenant improvement triggers path-of-travel obligations. In the industrial park's block buildings, an infrared CMU wall inspection checks for moisture and grout voids, and a cost-to-remedy report prices what the inspection finds.

Vacaville & Dixon

Vacaville is the region's biomanufacturing cluster. These facilities run continuous heavy electrical loads, depend on critical HVAC and cleanroom environments, and have almost no tolerance for unplanned downtime, which is the textbook case for electrical thermography.

Alongside that sits a substantial food and agricultural processing base. Those buildings bring their own problems: washdown environments, humidity, specialized ventilation, and the kind of persistent moisture that makes air quality and mold testing worth scoping in, and their large low-slope roofs are good candidates for an infrared roof survey. Dixon is also worth a note for buyers, because its seismic retrofit requirement is triggered by alteration or change of occupancy, which is exactly what a repositioning does.

Thermal Imaging in Solano County

Thermal imaging is often the quickest way to see what a Solano building is hiding. A thermal camera reads surface temperature, so wet roof insulation, an overheating breaker or an empty cell in a block wall shows up as a temperature difference nobody can see by eye. 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 for the building and the deal.

In Solano that usually means three kinds of work. The very large low-slope roofs over distribution and light industrial buildings along I-80 in Fairfield, Vacaville and Dixon are flown by drone in an infrared roof survey, with impedance testing to confirm what the camera flags, and hot, clear inland summer days give the kind of thermal contrast those surveys depend on. The heavy, continuous electrical loads in those same buildings, and in Benicia's Industrial Park, are a good fit for electrical thermography under NFPA 70B, done with the equipment energized and running. And the block buildings in the industrial parks call for an infrared CMU wall inspection, which finds missing grout and trapped moisture without opening the wall.

Food and agricultural processing buildings in Vacaville and Dixon deal with persistent moisture, and infrared helps trace where it is getting into walls and ceilings and where insulation has gotten wet. Where a heating or hot water line is suspected of leaking under a slab, the camera narrows the search before any concrete is cut. See all of our commercial infrared inspections.

Open Solano County in Google Maps

Buying, Leasing or Repositioning in Solano County?

Tell us the address and what the transaction needs. We will scope the inspection and send a proposal, with no obligation.