Private Provider Plan Review and Inspections

What this actually gets you

Florida Statute 553.791 permits an owner or contractor to retain a licensed private provider to perform plan review, building inspections, or both, in place of the local building department. The building official still issues the permit and the certificate of occupancy and retains audit rights; the private provider performs the review and inspection work and certifies compliance.

The practical effect on a busy jurisdiction is straightforward. Instead of your file sitting in a queue behind everyone else’s, we review it. Instead of taking the next available inspection slot four days out, we inspect when your trades are ready.

• Plan review performed by us rather than the building department queue
• Inspections scheduled to your construction sequence, not to a municipal calendar
• Both, or either — a common arrangement is department plan review with private inspections where scheduling is the real bottleneck
• Statutory notices prepared and filed on time, which is where projects most often forfeit the option
• Single-trade permits, which the statute has been amended to cover
• Reinspections without going back to the end of a queue

The part nobody else can offer

We engineer the project, we draw it, we file the permit, and we can review and inspect it as the private provider. That is unusual and it removes the handoffs that cost the most time.

When a private provider is a separate firm from the designer, every question becomes a phone call between two companies with different priorities and different schedules. When the same practice produced the drawings, there is no translation step — the person inspecting the connection detail is in the same office as the engineer who designed it.

For a contractor on a tight schedule, that is the difference between a project that moves and a project that waits.

When it makes the biggest difference

• The jurisdiction is backed up. Where plan review is running weeks, this is the single largest schedule saving available anywhere in the permitting process.
• Inspection scheduling is the bottleneck. Where next-available inspections are days out and trades are standing idle, private inspections pay for themselves quickly.
• The project is phased or fast-tracked. Sequencing flexibility has real value when the schedule is compressed.
• Repeat prototype work. Same design built repeatedly moves very fast when the reviewer already knows it.
• Delay carries a cost. A lease commencement, a seasonal opening, a financing deadline, a crew you are paying either way.
• Recertification repairs. Where a 40-year or milestone inspection has identified work that has to happen on a deadline.

How the process runs

1. We confirm the project qualifies and that the jurisdiction administers private provider work in a way that will actually save you time. If it will not, we say so.
2. We prepare and file the statutory notice to the building official within the required timeframe. Filed late or incorrectly, the option is forfeited for that project — this step is not a formality.
3. We define the scope: plan review only, inspections only, or both.
4. We perform the review, issue comments where the drawings need work, and certify compliance.
5. We schedule and perform inspections around your construction sequence and provide the required documentation to the building official.
6. We manage the interface through permit issuance and certificate of occupancy, including any audit the jurisdiction elects to perform — which is routine and should not derail anything.