San Francisco's uneven office recovery left many buildings partly vacant. How empty floors change the risk picture, and what a security assessment tests in them.
Downtown San Francisco is coming back, but it is coming back unevenly. Some towers are busy again. Others have whole floors that have been empty since 2020, sitting between tenants that came back years ago. That patchwork occupancy changes a building's security picture in ways that the old checklist never anticipated.
If your building's access control, camera coverage, and patrol plan were set up for full occupancy, they are answering questions nobody is asking anymore. Here is what a security assessment looks at in a San Francisco office building today, and why the partly vacant ones need attention first.
Occupied buildings carry a lot of informal security. Receptionists notice strangers. Employees notice propped doors. Tenants report the guy who has been sitting in the lobby for two hours. Whole floors of that everyday awareness disappear when the floor is empty.
Vacant suites also create places where problems can sit undetected. A door that does not latch on the 14th floor is a non-event when the suite next to it is staffed every day. On an empty floor, it can go unreported for weeks. Empty space invites trespassing, vandalism, and theft of copper and equipment, and it is also where water damage and other building problems get discovered late.
In a multi-tenant tower, the lobby, elevators, and stairwells are the building's real perimeter. When some tenants have left and others run hybrid schedules, foot traffic drops and patterns get harder to read. The people who do come and go are less familiar with each other, and tailgating gets easier because nobody thinks twice about holding the door for a stranger in a half-empty building.
An assessment looks hard at this stretch: how visitors are checked in, whether elevator floor control still matches current tenants, how deliveries and vendors move through the loading area, and what happens after hours when the building might have three dozen people spread across thirty floors.
On the access side, we walk the vacant floors and confirm that suite doors, stairwell doors, and roof access points actually latch and alarm. We check whether decommissioned tenants' credentials were fully removed from the system, which buildings often discover they were not. We look at camera coverage against today's traffic, not 2019's: an empty corridor needs different coverage than a busy one, and some cameras are still aimed at break rooms nobody uses.
On the operations side, we review how patrols have adapted. A guard route designed for a full building spends time where people already are. In a partly vacant building the priorities invert: the empty floors, the parking levels, and the mechanical spaces need the attention, because those are the places where a problem has time to grow.
Property managers re-leasing space are the obvious ones. Prospective tenants and their brokers ask about building security, and a current assessment is a better answer than a plan from before the pandemic. It also matters for insurance: carriers writing or renewing coverage on buildings with significant vacancy increasingly want to see that someone has looked at the empty space specifically.
Remaining tenants should ask too. If you occupy three floors of a building that used to be full, the shared systems protect you the same way they protect the landlord. An assessment of the common areas is in your interest even if your own suite is in good shape.
A San Francisco security assessment from Braav is a walkthrough plus a systems review: doors, locks, cameras, credentials, alarms, lighting, patrol overlap, and how all of it matches the way the building is actually used now. If you want a sense of the full scope first, we wrote a walkthrough of what a physical security assessment covers that lays out the whole process.
You come out of it with a written report: what is working, what has drifted, and a prioritized list of fixes sorted by risk and cost. No padlocks-for-sale pitch attached. If you want to talk through your building first, you can book a time directly with our team.
