Listings don’t tell you where the caterer parks.

I’ve been walking through units. Nothing is signed and I have nothing to announce, so treat this as what it is: notes from the search, not news about a building. But the search has taught me more about what this room needs than the year of planning that came before it.

A commercial listing tells you the square footage, the rate per square foot, and whichever two adjectives the agent likes best. It does not tell you where a van can pull up on a Saturday morning, or how far that spot is from wherever a caterer would set up. It doesn’t tell you whether the washrooms are on the same level as the room. It doesn’t tell you what the neighbouring unit does at nine on a Friday night. Those are the questions the whole business runs on, and none of them are in the ad.

A viewing answers most of it in the first two minutes, if you stop walking and stand still. Sound is the one that keeps surprising me: an empty box and the same box with a hundred people and a speaker in it are different buildings, and you can hear which one you’re in by clapping once. I’ve started asking to be left alone in a space for a few minutes, which agents find odd and do anyway.

The other half of a viewing is the landlord, and that is not in the listing either. A different caterer in the building most weekends. Deliveries early. Music until eleven. Some landlords hear that and relax, and some hear it and start talking carefully about the other tenants. That answer decides more than anything on the drawings does, and it’s the reason a space can look right and still be wrong.

So: still looking, still nothing to report. I’d rather post that than post nothing and let the quiet do the lying for me.