Jason Somers, President & Founder of Crest Real Estate Shares His Secrets to Success in the Permitting & Expediting Industry

If you’re getting ready to begin the development process for a new home or commercial building, you’ll be tasked with completing a number of essential processes before you can get started with constructing the building in question. Processes like permitting are necessary during the pre-construction phase of development. However, permitting and similar steps can take a long time to be completed if you don’t have assistance, which may delay progress for your construction project and require you to push back the construction timeline.

To solve these issues, it’s highly recommended that you look into using Crest’s services. At Crest Real Estate, you’ll discover a wide range of services that are designed to help developers throughout the construction process. For instance, Crest can assist you in doing your due diligence, which can involve everything from collecting site information to making sure that all of your legal obligations are understood. The due diligence process is meant to mitigate risks before construction gets underway.

Some additional services available through Crest include entitlements and permits, expediting, design and massing, and project management. The expediting service is particularly important since it’s designed to help facilitate a smoother permitting process. Crest Real Estate has been in business for more than ten years and was founded by Jason Somers. As the current president of Crest Real Estate, Jason is involved with every project that’s completed by the company.

Over the years, Crest Real Estate has finished more than 1,000 projects, which have amounted to over $1 billion in total construction costs. In that time, they have worked with many famous architects, companies, and brands to complete projects in a timely fashion. Just recently, Crest helped sell the Beverly Hills residence of Chrissy Teigen and John Legend. They’ve also worked with architects like Howard Bracken and Paul McClean.

Over the years, Crest has done extensive business with real estate development companies like Plus Development. The Crest team can complete permit work and other services throughout Los Angeles County, which includes areas like Beverly Hills and neighborhoods like Brentwood. This article offers a more in-depth look at the expediting and permitting industry.

The Expediting & Permitting Industry in Los Angeles, CA

permitting and expediting explained

The expediting and permitting industry is integral to anyone who wants to complete the permitting process efficiently. When you begin to develop a building of any kind in Los Angeles, you must first obtain a building permit, which is a special permit that grants you the ability to build the structure as displayed in your building plans.

Without first seeking a building permit, any structure you build would be considered illegal, which means that the Los Angeles County government could demolish any work that you’ve done. By seeking a permit before starting construction, you can be confident that your building plans are sound and that the construction process shouldn’t encounter any lengthy delays.

However, it’s possible for the permitting process to take a long time to be completed. If there aren’t any issues, the permit application for building a residential home can be approved in two weeks. On the other hand, permits for commercial buildings may take as long as four weeks to be approved.

While your permit application could be approved without issue, there’s also a chance that something will delay approval. Whether your building plans aren’t up to code or you haven’t included an essential piece of information in the application, even the smallest of problems can lead to a sizable delay. Crest’s professional expediters are able to speed up the entire permitting process by helping you provide the proper documentation for the application and by speaking with county officials in the event that issues arise.

The permitting process is especially important when you’re attempting to develop a custom home. The complexities of designing a custom home can lengthen the permitting process if you don’t have an expediter by your side. However, the professionals at Crest can help you bypass these problems and make it easier for you to finish the custom home on a quicker timeline. By shortening the timeline and making it more efficient, overall construction costs should decrease significantly.

Exclusive Interview with Crest Real Estate’s Jason Somers

interview with Jason Somers

We interviewed expert Jason Somers on the permitting and expediting process of Crest’s services. The following interview offers a behind-the-scenes look at the permitting and expediting process and what it means for the construction industry.

People do mention how the permitting and expediting process can be time consuming with a lot of paperwork and detail involved. Can you elaborate on the process more from the perspective of Crest ?

Jason Somers: “If the process were simple we would not have the desire and need for the services that we currently command. However, it’s not as though these processes are unnecessary there is a lot of very important oversight and review that goes into the permitting of a new project that goes into the zoning at the basic states but then it goes into the important details like the structural planned review to make sure that the building is stable, geotechnical for the ground stability, environmental with water and landscaping and energy that is utilized by the house, and it really just spans into so many different departments where it becomes this long process with many many layers but if you took any of them away there may be a lack of oversight and careful consideration needed to make sure the projects that are built in these cities are at the most well-executed level possibly.”

Crest is well-known in the Los Angeles area for their permitting and entitlement services. What other services does your company offer and why are they important to mention?

Jason Somers: “Because we are able to work with so many hundreds of different consultants and clientele, we found an important role advising project teams and clients on who might fit their criteria and needs the best. So we like to input our recommendations to clients on the best consultants to execute their project to the highest level.”

The Crest website mentions Permit Acquisition Packages being thorough, strategic, and thoughtfully prepared. Can you elaborate on Crest’s services a bit more and why they are held in such high regard in the Greater Los Angeles area?

Jason Somers: “When you are looking to acquire a high-value asset it is very important to know all the allowances and more importantly some of the restrictions of those properties. What we do with our coined PDA, standing for property, development, and analysis, is come up with the full game plan and strategy for your design team and you as a client looking at the abilities for a property with its future development potential. Having this laid out during your initial due diligence phases or in the initial stages of a new design project is paramount so that everyone on the team knows the ground rules going into the project. Our report puts it into a very cohesive and well-organized breakdown of all of these requirements, allowances, and restrictions.”

The Crest website also mentions how the involvement begins at different stages throughout the development process. What are some of these different stages?

Jason Somers: “Ideally we come in at the front end so that we can provide our property dev analysis so that when someone is looking to acquire or sell a property, they are either buying it with all knowledge or selling it for the maximum allowed value with the least amount of contingencies so that someone coming in to purchase the property can understand what it is that is being sold. However, we are not always fortunate enough to come in at the front end of a project. So in those cases, we can be brought on during the design phase, where we are working with the design team and co consulting on the allowances and code restrictions together to get the permits, or we are brought in after their project is submitted and people realize they’ve missed important and critical items that could have been solved earlier and we come in to solve those problems.”

Final Thoughts

Jason Somers believes that the permitting and expediting industry is essential for the ongoing success of the construction industry. Without expediting services, construction timelines will lengthen, which leads to higher project costs and fewer buildings being developed in a given month or year. In general, the expediting and permitting processes have become intertwined in recent years.

Because building permits are necessary for building nearly any structure, the expediting process can assist in completing this process faster than it typically would be. As mentioned previously, the consequences of ignoring the permitting process are plentiful and can cause you to waste a substantial amount of time and money. If you’re looking into developing a building of any kind, having an expediter by your side throughout the pre-construction phase of development can pay dividends.

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