What questions should I ask a commercial deck rebuilding contractor in Detroit?

Most hiring checklists online were written for homeowners, and it shows. They tell you to check references and ask about composite brands. Fine advice for a backyard, useless for a garden apartment with twelve balcony stacks or a restaurant rooftop deck that seats eighty. A commercial owner in metro Detroit answers to a building inspector, an insurance carrier, sometimes a lender or a condo board. The questions below are built for that situation, and for each one we tell you what a good answer sounds like.

The eight questions, with the answers you should hear

1. Have you rebuilt this kind of structure before? Not decks in general. Your kind: second-floor walkways on a 1970s garden apartment, a flagged exterior stair tower, a rooftop deck over occupied space. Ask for addresses of commercial projects, then drive past one. A residential portfolio full of Trex patios and pergolas is a different trade.
2. What live load will you design to? You want a number, and for seating areas that number is 100 pounds per square foot, the assembly load in the building code Michigan adopts from the International Code Council. Residential decks are designed to 40. A contractor who cannot quote the difference will build you a residential deck with commercial furniture on it.
3. Who does the engineering and who pulls the permit? The right answer is that the contractor handles both inside the contract price: engineered drawings where the structure needs them, permit pulled in your municipality, and inspections met by their crew. If anyone suggests you pull the permit yourself as the owner, end the meeting. That move shifts code responsibility onto you.
4. Can I see current insurance certificates? General liability and workers compensation, sent directly from their agent, with your entity named as additional insured for the project. A certificate the contractor emails you themselves can be months stale. This is the one question where paperwork formality genuinely protects you, because a fall from a deck is exactly the claim type that finds uninsured subs.
5. How do you phase work around an occupied building? Tenants still need to get to their units while their stair tower is down. A commercial contractor should describe temporary access, unit-by-unit balcony sequencing, and for hospitality, an off-season calendar. Our balcony page walks through what phased reconstruction looks like on a whole building.
6. What did you find at the ledger? Ask this after their site walk. The ledger is the connection bolting the deck to your building, and deck failure investigations compiled by the North American Deck and Railing Association point at ledger connections and guards far more often than boards or joists. A contractor who probed the rim framing and shows you photos did an inspection. One who quotes from the parking lot did arithmetic.
7. What exactly is in this price, and what could move it? Good contractors name the risks up front: rot that runs into the rim, access equipment, guard height upgrades to current code. Each should carry its own number before work starts. Vague answers here become change orders later.
8. What paperwork do I get at closeout? Closed permit, inspection signoffs, and material documentation. That file is what your insurance carrier, your lender at refinance, or your buyer at sale will ask for. A contractor who shrugs at this question plans to leave you without it.

Good answers and bad ones, side by side

How do I verify a commercial contractor in Michigan?

Differently than the internet tells you, because Michigan does not issue a general commercial contractor license. The state licenses residential builders and the skilled trades through LARA, so "check their state license" advice written for homeowners does not map cleanly onto a commercial deck rebuild. Verification on commercial work looks like this: insurance certificates direct from the agent, electrical or other trade subs holding their LARA licenses, and a permit history you can confirm with the local building department, which in Detroit proper means BSEED. A contractor comfortable with that scrutiny will hand you everything in one email. A contractor who leans on a logo and a lawn sign will change the subject.

What should the quote itself look like?

Line items you can check against public numbers. We publish ours: full structural rebuilds at $45 to $85 per square foot, balconies at $9,000 to $22,000 each, stair towers at $8,000 to $18,000, guards at $90 to $160 per linear foot, all on the cost guide with the factors that move each range. Any quote you receive, from us or anyone else, should decompose into scopes you can price against ranges like these. A single lump sum with no scope breakdown is not a quote, it is a request for trust. Property managers comparing bids across a portfolio can find report formats boards accept on our property manager page.