A warehouse strip-out is rarely about the building. It’s about a date on a lease and a clause that says you’ll hand the place back the way you found it.
That deadline drives everything, and it’s also why so many strip-outs leak money. The job gets booked late, the contractor prices it as a disposal exercise, and several tonnes of perfectly good steel walk off site as somebody else’s margin. Planned properly, that metal is the one line in the budget that pays inward.
Here’s how to sequence it.
Start with the lease, not the shed
Read the make-good clause before you get a single quote. It decides the scope of the whole job, and the scope decides the price.
Some clauses require a return to base building: everything out, floor patched, walls made good, lighting and power back to original. Others are far softer, and some landlords would rather keep a mezzanine or a cool room than have you remove it. That conversation is worth having early, because “leave it” is the cheapest strip-out available and it happens more often than people expect.
Get it in writing either way. A verbal agreement with an outgoing property manager is worth nothing when a new one takes over mid-job.
Work backwards from the handover date
Holdover rent is usually the most expensive part of getting this wrong. Overrun by a fortnight in a decent-sized facility and you’ve spent more than the entire metal recovery was worth.
Build the program backwards from handover, and then add a buffer for the two things that always take longer than planned: waiting on an electrician to isolate and certify, and waiting on a licensed removalist if anything suspect turns up in the roof or the switchboard backing. Anything built or refitted before the 1990s needs an asbestos inspection before work starts, and licensed removal requires five days’ notice to WorkSafe Victoria.
Book contractors around lease end, not around when you’d like to start.
Decide who owns the scrap, and say so in the contract
This is the part most tenants never think about.
If a strip-out contractor is taking the metal away, they’re taking an asset. Several tonnes of racking, structural steel, cable and aluminium have real value, and unless your contract says otherwise, that value is theirs.
You have three options. Let the contractor keep it and require their price to reflect it. Sell the metal yourself and pay the contractor for labour only. Or split it on an agreed basis. Any of the three is fine. What isn’t fine is not knowing which one you’ve agreed to.
Get the metal quoted independently before you sign anything, so you know what you’re giving away. A yard that walks the site can put a figure on the whole job rather than on individual items.
Know what’s worth more standing than weighed
Racking is the big one. Second-hand pallet racking has an active market, and a clean, undamaged, documented system can be worth several times its scrap value. Once it’s cut down, it’s just steel at heavy-melting rates.
The catch is compliance. Racking with impact damage, missing components, or no documentation generally can’t be resold for storage use, and nobody reputable will take it on. If it’s damaged, it’s scrap, and pretending otherwise just delays the job.
The same logic applies to mezzanine systems, dock levellers, cool room panels and any conveyor or materials handling gear. Working equipment sold as equipment beats the same equipment sold by the kilo, almost every time.
Sequence around access, not around convenience
A warehouse strips out from the inside forward, and the things that let you work are the last things to go.
Fit-out and office partitions come out first. Then shelving, small plant and loose steel. Racking next, which is the bulk of the tonnage and needs the most forklift time. Mezzanines after that, with engineering input if anything ties into the structure.
Lighting, power and the dock levellers stay until the end, because you need light to work by, power for tools, and a functioning dock to load the trucks that are carting everything else away. Pull the dock leveller early, and you’ve created a manual handling problem for the rest of the job.
Cool rooms are their own exercise. Refrigerant has to be recovered by a licensed technician before anything is cut, and the panels are steel or stainless skin bonded to foam, which has to be separated before the metal is worth anything much.
Think about access before you promise anyone a truck
Estate access constraints cause more delay than the actual work. Overhead clearance, hardstand, whether a semi can turn around in the yard, shared driveways in multi-tenant estates, body corporate rules about noise and hours, and whether you’re allowed on site at all outside business hours.
In tight sites, smaller trucks running more often beat one big one that can’t get in. Work that out in the walkthrough rather than on the morning of the first collection.
Get the sorting set up on day one
Warehouse strip-outs are steel-heavy and low on high-value metal, which tempts people into a single skip. Resist it, because the exceptions are worth real money.
Run separate streams from the start: mild steel and racking, aluminium, stainless, and cable. Cable off a warehouse lighting and power reticulation is usually the best-paying metal on the site by a distance, and it’s the easiest to lose into a mixed bin.
Keep copper and cable secure or off-site daily. An unattended bin in an empty estate over a weekend is a known target.
What to ask a metal buyer before you commit
Ask whether they’ll quote the whole job rather than per item, whether collection is included, what their minimum load is, and whether you’ll get weighbridge dockets for every truck. Ask what they do with the non-metal fraction, because under Victorian environmental law the duty for that waste sits with whoever generated it, and it doesn’t disappear when a truck leaves.
And ask them to walk the site. A quote given over the phone from a photo is a guess, and it will be revised downward once someone sees the condition of the racking.
Johnny Metal Recycling quotes warehouse and commercial strip-outs across Melbourne, with collection scheduled around your handover date.