San Diego · Office and lab

Standing up the new lab is the easy part.

Emptying the old one is the part nobody owns. Moving, consolidating, or downsizing in San Diego leaves you with a floor of office furniture and a lab full of casework, and both have to be out by a date somebody else set.

Book 30 minutes with Brandi

Thirty minutes with our CEO. No pitch deck, no proposal, no obligation. You leave with a liquidation strategy for the furniture and the lab assets both.

Brandi Susewitz, RESEAT co-founder and CEO, seated on a conference table surrounded by second-life task chairs

Brandi Susewitz Co-founder and CEO. She takes these calls herself.

Why you are reading this

Three ways this lands on your desk.

Someone else has been handling the real estate. Then the contents of the current building turn out to be nobody's job, usually about a month before handover.

01 — Moving

The new building is already spec'd.

New benching, new casework, new hood layout, drawn around the programme you are running next. Which means the fit-out in the building you are leaving is surplus on day one, and it is worth real money to somebody standing up their first lab.

02 — Consolidating

Two sites, one address.

A merger, an acquisition, or a portfolio cleanup collapses two buildings into one. You end up with duplicate everything: two floors of workstations, two labs' worth of casework, and one facilities lead holding both keys.

03 — Downsizing

Same building, less of it.

A programme ends, a raise comes in smaller than planned, or the office count drops and the bench count with it. Nothing is leaving the site, but a lot of it is leaving the floor plan, and surplus with no plan becomes surplus in a hallway.

The lab side

Casework is not construction debris.

Lab fit-out gets written off as part of the demolition line because it is bolted down and it looks permanent. Most of it is neither. There is a real second life market for it, and the buyer is usually a company two exits down doing what you were doing five years ago.

—Casework and base cabinets. Metal casework in particular holds value well. It is built to a standard that outlasts the programme it was bought for.
—Benching and work surfaces. Epoxy resin tops, phenolic, and stainless. Condition matters more here than anywhere else in the lab, and it is worth an honest look before anything is assumed.
—Fume hood shells and enclosures. Resale depends heavily on age, certification history, and whether the shell comes out intact. Some are worth moving and some are not, and knowing which is a five minute conversation.
—Lab seating and write-up stations. The most consistently resellable category in the room, and the one most often thrown out with the demolition.
—Glassware, reagent and cold storage. Shelving, cabinetry and storage furniture, distinct from the instruments inside them.
—The office on the other side of the door. Workstations, task chairs, conference and reception. Usually the larger share of recoverable value, and the part that gets planned last.

The cost of leaving it late

Almost none of it is worn out.

A bench installed for a programme that ran four years is not used up. It is unfashionable for your next fit-out and perfectly good for somebody else's first one. The reason it goes in a skip is a calendar problem, not a condition problem.

17B

Pounds of office furniture the US throws away every year.

99%

Of quality commercial furniture that ends up in a landfill.

12M+

Pounds RESEAT has kept out of landfills so far.

40-60%

What second life product saves a buyer against the same piece new.

Local specifics

Torrey Pines and East Village are different projects.

Most of what decides a San Diego decommission is the building and the lease, not the furniture. These are the things that come up on the first call, because they are the ones that move dates and change the number.

—Restoration to shell. The most expensive sentence in most life sciences leases. Worth reading together, because resale can offset a meaningful share of what removal costs.
—Decon and clearance sequencing. Nothing moves before that paperwork exists. Knowing what is headed to resale changes what is worth decontaminating at all.
—Loading and access. A Torrey Pines campus, a Sorrento Valley flex building and a downtown tower each hand you a different dock, a different elevator, and a different set of hours.
—Landlord and property manager sign-off. Multi-tenant life sciences parks generally want COIs, method statements and scheduled windows before a crew is on site.
—Submarkets we get asked about most. Torrey Pines, UTC, Sorrento Valley, Sorrento Mesa, Carmel Valley, Del Mar Heights, Mira Mesa and Downtown.

RESEAT founders Brandi and Eric Susewitz at Best of NeoCon

Who you are booking

You get Brandi. Not a rep.

Brandi Susewitz is RESEAT's co-founder and CEO. She and Eric Susewitz started the company on a single observation: 17 billion pounds of office furniture goes in the ground every year in the US, and 99% of the good commercial product follows it. Not because anybody is careless. Because nobody had a plan for it.

That is the whole company. Furniture sits in a hallway for two weeks and ends up on the curb, and the difference between a curb and a check is almost always how early somebody thought about it. RESEAT has kept 12M+ pounds out of landfills working that one problem, and the work has been recognised at Best of NeoCon.

On this call she is working your building, your dates, your restoration clause and your mix. What resells, what is worth a donation letter, what genuinely has to be recycled, and the order it should happen in so the value is still there when the crew arrives.

Brandi Susewitz Co-founder and CEO, RESEAT

Book 30 minutes with Brandi

The 30 minutes

What the call actually covers.

Four things, in this order. If your situation is simpler than this, it takes twenty minutes and you get the rest back.

What is in the building

Office counts, lab footprint, casework and benching, rough condition. Estimates are fine. Nobody needs an asset register for this conversation.

Your dates and your lease

Handover date, restoration obligations, decon schedule, and who signs off. This is usually where the real constraints are hiding.

The disposition split

What resells, what redeploys, what gets donated with a tax letter, what has to be recycled. In that order, because that is the order that recovers value.

The sequence and the number

What happens when, who runs each part, and a realistic range for what it recovers or costs. Not a quote. A plan you could hand to your PM.

Before you close the tab

Reasons people wait, and why they do not hold.

Do you actually work San Diego, or is this a Bay Area company running ads?

Straight answer: RESEAT is headquartered in the Bay Area and that is where we run crews directly. San Diego work is run through our dealer network, and the resale demand for second life commercial furniture and lab casework was never regional to begin with. On the call Brandi will tell you exactly which parts we would run ourselves and which parts we would coordinate, before you decide anything.

Where does lab equipment stop and furniture start?

Analytical instruments, and anything with a service contract and a calibration history, sit in a different resale market than furniture and we will point you at it rather than pretend otherwise. What we work is the built environment: casework and base cabinets, benching and epoxy tops, fume hood shells, lab seating, write-up stations, glassware and reagent storage, and the office furniture on the other side of the door.

Everything has to be decontaminated and cleared first. Does that complicate this?

No, it sequences it. Decon and clearance are yours or your EH&S vendor's, and nothing moves before that paperwork exists. We work downstream of it. Bringing us in early actually helps, because knowing what is going to resale versus recycling changes what is worth decontaminating in the first place.

We have not signed the new lease yet. Is it too early?

It is the best time. Timing decides recovery more than condition does. Six months of lead time means the casework gets sorted, listed, and sold into demand. Three weeks means a disposal quote and a dumpster. The call costs half an hour either way.

Our landlord restoration clause says the lab comes back to shell.

Then that clause is the single biggest number in this project, and it is worth reading together on the call. Restoration obligations are where San Diego lab decommissions go over budget, and there is usually more room in the sequencing than people assume once resale is offsetting part of the removal.

We are downsizing, not leaving. Is that still worth a call?

Often more so. A downsize leaves you with surplus rather than an empty building, which means redeployment is on the table alongside resale. Working out what stays, what moves, and what goes is exactly the conversation, and it is cheaper to have it before the reconfiguration is drawn.

Is this a sales call?

No. No quote at the end, nothing to sign. It is a working session on what you have and what to do with it. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is a fine outcome and you have still got a plan out of it.