Parking lots, churches, apartment and condominium properties across metro Atlanta. The same sealer that goes on a driveway. Almost nothing else about the job is the same.
Most sealcoating writing about commercial property is northern, and it is all about cracking: water gets in, freezes, opens the crack, repeat. Atlanta gets about two inches of snow a year. That is not the mechanism.
What happens on a Georgia lot is deformation. Asphalt is a flexible pavement and it softens as it gets hot, and dark asphalt in July runs far above the air temperature. Put a loaded delivery truck on a soft surface, in the same place, every morning, and the surface moves rather than breaks. You get ruts in the drive lane, a dished patch at the dumpster pad, and a shallow bowl wherever trailers set their landing gear down.
This matters for a practical reason: sealer does not fix a rut. A coat over a deformed lane is a darker deformed lane. If yours has started to move, the conversation is about repair first, and we would rather have it at the quote than after.
Metro Atlanta is built on clay, and clay holds water rather than letting it through. Add roughly fifty inches of rain a year and every low point on a lot is a place water sits in the ground under the pavement instead of leaving.
A commercial lot shows you where that is happening. The dark patch that stays wet two days after everyone else has dried, the section at the bottom of the fall, the strip beside the beds where runoff crosses. Those are the places the base is softest and the places that will fail first whatever goes on top.
Walking a lot the morning after rain tells you more about it than walking it dry, and it is worth doing before spending anything.
Apartment and condominium lots here are frequently wooded, which is exactly why people want to live in them, and it changes the job. Sealer does not bond to algae, moss, or the slick that builds where a surface never fully dries.
On a residential drive that is one afternoon of extra work. On a three acre property it is a line worth pricing properly, with a treatment and a wait built into the schedule rather than a pass with a blower on the morning.
It is also the part most commonly left out of a cheap commercial quote, because it is invisible in a total.
There is one clear advantage to running commercial work in Georgia. There is no October deadline. A property that cannot take disruption in spring can be done in November, or in a dry stretch in February, and nothing is lost by waiting for a month that suits you.
What replaces the seasonal pressure is a daily one. Sealer needs twenty four to forty eight hours before vehicles, a dry surface going down and dry hours after, and in summer the storms build in the afternoon. So commercial work here starts early and finishes sections rather than starting sections.
Phasing is the usual answer: the lot is split so part of it is always open, and the split follows your traffic rather than our convenience. A property that can genuinely close for two days costs less than the same property done in four evening sections, and you should see that on the quote instead of being quietly charged for it.
Sealer covers every marking, so striping is part of the job rather than an extra. Most lots go straight back the way they were.
Two things are worth twenty minutes while the paint is off. Accessible spaces should go back to the current specification rather than wherever the old paint happened to sit, access aisle and signage included. And if you have ever wished the lot held two more cars, the only cheap moment to find out whether it can is while there are no lines on it.
We will tell you what is on the ground and what changing it would take. We will not sign anything off as compliant, because that is not ours to sign.
Walked and measured on the property, never taken off an aerial photograph. Aerials miss the strip behind the building, the islands and the loading area, and they cannot see which end of the lot stays wet.
Three lines come back. Sealing by area. Preparation, which on a shaded Atlanta property is a bigger line than owners expect and on a clean sunny one is a small one. Striping counted per stall and per marking, so a like for like repaint and a relayout are not the same price.
Crack filling is measured by the linear foot and quoted separately. On a southern lot it is usually a smaller share of the total than it would be up north, for the reasons above.
There is no charge to be measured and no obligation to book.
Strip retail, churches, office parks, apartment and condominium lots, self storage, medical and dental practices, and private roads run by an association. Anything from six stalls behind a shop up to a few acres. Sandy Springs, Roswell, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Marietta, Smyrna, Dunwoody and the rest of the north metro.
Send the address and roughly what the property is. You get a measured number back, split out by line, and a way of scheduling it that does not shut you down.
