Quickdraw Permit Consulting

Our TIC hired Jeremy to help navigate a very complicated Condo Conversion report from the SF Department of Building Inspections. Jeremy presented himself as an expert who, having worked at or with the DBI for 20 years, knew how to resolve missing permit issues. We hired him on May 5, paid $ 750 and never received any concrete help. He would respond with emails stating that he went through reams of documents and could not find a way to easily resolve our permit issues. We supplied him with permits we had in hand, building plan drawings, and sub contractor information. This should have been enough to track down the permit issues and resolve some of them.
I waited until now to post a review because I believed Jeremy must have tried and came up empty for reasonable reasons. It is only after I have procured copies of 8 permits that had been listed as needing to be signed off by an inspector, that I now know Jeremy either did not make any effort on our behalf or did not understand the DBI records system as well as he suggested to us. I was able, through cross referencing, find job cards that were signed off by the inspector for at least 8 our of outstanding issues.
Had Jeremy found this information, which is located on the 4^th Floor of the DBI building, in June or July, we would have completed our Condo Conversion process months ago. So, please save yourselves time and money and find another permit consultant other then Jeremy.

Please save yourself your $ and frustration. I wrote to Quickdraw in June of this year with help from a stalled building permit. Jeremy wrote back promptly that «it sounds like something we can help with…» After a 3 minute conversation over the phone, Jeremy sent me a bill for $ 750 to assist and indicated that he was at the permit office «looking into the situation». Well… that was the end of any communication. Two emails to Jeremy have been left unanswered and my $ 750 is gone. Absolutely nothing was done for us at all.
Looking into small claims court and will be filing with the BBB as well. You simply can’t take someone’s money and do nothing.

I can’t say it better than Benji J. did in 2010. Jeremy Paul was direct, fast, and decisive. From initial phone call, through resolution of the issues at hand, his expertise was evident, helpful, and successful. Had discussed my situation with Contractors, Architects, and Lawyers on the way to becoming confident that Jeremy Paul was the clear choice. We are happy to have worked with him.

I was considering hiring Jeremy Paul for a consultation and I saved myself $ 750 in fees for a consultation. That’s what one would pay an architect for several hours of work and not a mere consultation, and Jeremy has no technical qualifications.
I asked him that I was told that he charges $ 500 for a consultation and not $ 750, to which he replied that he didn’t want to work with me since if I already think his service is worth $ 500, I’ll never be satisfied.
Any seasoned person in the service industry would say” well once you hire me, you will feel that I was worth more than $ 750″, as opposed to getting all defensive. Who in the services industry wants you to be convinced they are worth it, even before they hire you and get all wired up? You want to walk away feeling that you met someone really smart and the money was well spent and you would recommend him/​her to anyone. I felt nothing like that in the interaction.
I happened to be talking to my realtor about the situation and he mentioned that he had worked with Jeremy a few years ago and he was nothing but «attitude» and if the work is not difficult enough, dealing with him is worse.
Bottom line — if you don’t know much about permitting, you’ll never know whether he’s knowledgeable or not. I’m a builder and needed specialized help, which he couldn’t render. Instead, he sounded like a teenager on periods.
Go the building department and spend a few hours there, they will tell you all you need to know. And with the money you save, buy a homeless guy a lunch!

At first we were concerned about hiring Jeremy because of the disparate Unilocal reviews. However, we ended up feeling good about his assistance. He did the home visit, and then followed up several times with historical research about our particular property, and creative and knowledgeable ideas about how permitting might be accomplished. He provided info that we could not have come up with on our own, and ideas that none of the many architects and contractors we’ve had on our property seemed to have. In our case, he ended up recommending against going forward with our project/​permitting, when it would seem against his own best interests to do so (he had more money to gain by assisting us in an attempt, but he worried that we would not be successful, and so didn’t advise proceeding). In the difficult area of SF permitting, I think it’s important to differentiate between whether Jeremy is providing the best service that he can, and whether or not the client is able to achieve what they want in the end. He can’t work miracles, but can share his expertise in ways that are clearly useful.

The reason there are so many dissatisfied reviews on Unilocal recently is because ever since Larry Badiner was fired from Planning, Jeremy has no ins. He may have at one time, but that’s gone.
I’d also encourage past and potential clients to review California Superior Court Case # 4 002 263 Jeremy Paul v. Michael Nadelman — this case will give you a great understanding of how Jeremy works (or in this case, doesn’t work).

We came to Jeremy through the recommendation of a friend, as we wanted to understand our rights regarding a neighboring development that threatened our view and light.
The initial consult and visit was $ 500 and was set up quickly by email. His assistant Cathy was very responsive and quick to return emails and this seemed a good omen; this changes post-​payment however.
Jeremy visits on Friday 8 July and gives his assessment of the situation (looking at the neighboring yard from my house). During the visit, he tells me I can visit some PG&E center where they’d be glad to help me with a customized light study for my property. I give him the URL for the Planning Board’s docket of the development in question, and he promises to get back to me by Monday or Tuesday of the following week after his reading of it. I pay him $ 500 by check.
That’s it. That’s literally all I ever got from him for that payment. I followed up a week later with Cathy, who said he had a family emergency, which later turned into an injured leg. Emails to him go unanswered for two weeks and I have to communicate through Cathy.
To keep up my end of the relationship, I did visit the PG&E Pacific Energy Center, and found that they do not perform free services of the sort that Jeremy told me to expect from them.
After I complained to him about his behavior (i.e., the lack of any concrete action), on Aug 1 he quickly conceded and said that he’d cut a check for a (partial) refund. After not seeing it after 2 weeks, I contact him again, and he said that «It’s on my stack of checks to write this week» (Aug 15).
That was a month ago. I reached out again this week but no answer. My only recourse is to document my experience here and let others reach their own conclusion about whether it’s worth it.
Summary:
1. Jeremy told me he’d read through the docket and give a summary in two-​three business days. He did not.
2. Jeremy told me that PG&E could do services for me which they do not.
3. Jeremy told me to expect a check for partial reimbursement of services not rendered. That check was promised six weeks ago.
Edit: raised the rating up one star because the check came 1 week after writing the original review.

While Jeremy may or may not have pull at DBI and other such cryptic, Kafka-​esque establishments (and all we knos is just what he’s told us he’s done on our behalf, though have yet to acquire any actual proof), his treatment of clients is fantastically unprofessional. I am not surprised to learn from the reviewer above that there is a case involving him outright lying to a client.
He is impossible to reach by phone, and if he does return email, it is in curt one-​sentence responses that usually don’t even answer your initial question. One time we resorted to simply going over and waiting at his office for him to show up (goodbye, half a day at work!), literally ambushing him in order to get some information about our case — the case he was supposedly representing, on our behalf, and taking a nice couple of grand from us to do. Now that we are over and done with him, we need the files for our case and he is basically just not giving them to us. Isn’t that alone enough reason to be dis-​barred?

We consulted with Jeremy Paul.
Our problem: we bought a new house that had some unpermitted work done, and wanted to understand if it was a risk to doing new, permitted work that we were planning as part of the purchase.
Jeremy was very professional, and came to our house and gave us a ton of information about the politics related to permitting work in the city. At the end of our meeting, we were intrigued, and interested in working with him further if we needed to pursue a big project. We also didn’t know anything about our property — just that doing business in our neighborhood would mean interacting with a jerk in the city that «we better know somebody who does beer with».
We had purchased the feasibility study, 500 bucks to come consult. I had expected a «study» in return, but his one hour fly-​by was what he considered his end of the contract — no follow up or recommendation.
After several months of email, and finally contacting my lawyer to apply pressure, he responded. The result was an up-​sell conversation with my wife. We’re still unsure of the risk we own, or if we can permit new work.
At this point I consider the 500 dollars a sunk cost and a lost cause. We’re not going to pursue this any longer.
My recommendation: if you have an active project and need advice/​support/​etc pushing it through the legal process — he seems to be well connected and can probably help. If you are in my shoes with a new property that has unpermitted work, looking for information before you make a decision, I don’t think his services are worth the cost.

Jeremy Paul is an absolute pleasure to work with; it does not get any more professional than this. I was having issues determining the legal status of a building in the city; Jeremy quickly came to the rescue. If you need the answer to tricky SF real estate queries, Jeremy is your guy!

Do you want to make your illegal construction that’s in your home legal? Are you wondering what it means to buy unwarranted construction in SF? Do you have a tricky project that you want to do legally with permits? Did someone lodge a complaint with DBI or planning about your property and you need to clear it up? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you might need a permit consultant, which is why you are reading this review
You might also wonder, why even do construction legally (warranted) in San Francisco? People build illegal inlaw units all the time, and there are some good reasons why you’d want to do this. It won’t increase your real estate taxes. It’s cheaper as you don’t have to pay the city fees or pay for inspectors. You can cut corners if you want and you don’t have to make everything code compliant.
Why build legally? Your neighbors can’t complain and stop your work, and when you go to resell there’s no concern that the changes you made will have to be ripped out, and the city inspects your work and signs off on it. There’s probably other benefits to doing legal work, but that’s my perception of the benefits
We met with Jeremy Paul from Quickdraw consulting for a feasibility study, which is how you get started. You pay for this, and he tells you what your odds are for getting a permit, will you need a variance or not, how much their services will cost, etc. His linkedin title says: «Slayer of Bureaucratic Dragons», which is a great summary of what they do. Cathy does most of the emailing and coordination work.
We ended up talking to a permit consultant as we had been told different things by different planners, and our architects were out of their scope of expertise regarding the planning rules we were hitting. You hire a permit consultant for their experience getting permits pulled. How do they do this? If they told you those secrets you wouldn’t need to hire them! I assume it’s due to their experience having been through many situations, knowing when the rules can be bended, knowing which people in the department are strict on some rules and loose on others, and the advise you on how to package up your application so it will cause the fewest red flags when presented. One would hope and believes that everything they do is above board, there are stories of sketchy permit consultants, everything they did seemed to be above board to me.
What did they do for us? They helped us get a garage room permited and an ourdoor parking spot permitted.
One would think in the united states you wouldn’t need to purchase such a service, that the DBI and planning department would want you to build legally and would help you navigate their tricky rules so that they can get paid for the permits. Not true, different people interpret the laws in different ways, and some people are helpful, some are not.
Is it worth it? I think it is if you have a large project or a project that might trigger a variance. It’s also worth it if you want the highest possible chance of getting your permit with the least amount of hassle. I wish we had consulted them earlier on in the project, we would have avoided some paths we went down and probably in the end would have saved money. For our project, it was going to either be impossible to build illegally or it was going to be expensive, and we thought our neighbors might have issues with it. We had to do a curb cut and Jeremy recommended a local architect who had done plans for a curb cut before. They are not cheap, they are likely more expensive than your architect, but they got the job done without triggering a variance application, and I’m not sure our architects could have received permits for our project, and if you involve them early on, they might help you avoid costly mistakes.
If you are trying to move fast, using a consultant will help you get permits faster. They bill by the hour and part of the initial meeting is to provide an estimate, though its pretty hard to estimate since if you trigger a variance, it takes more time to push a project through.
What could they do better? They don’t do a great job communicating status and updates. At one point I think they went on vacation but didn’t have an out of office reply and didn’t tell us, so we were wondering what was going on. We also never received a cell phone number to contact them, and they rarely pickup their office line, email is the primary way we communicated with them, which worked well most of the time.
Other consultant options:
(more commercial than residential)
Overall, I’d recommend them and would use them again if I had to, and have recommended them to a couple of people. If your project is straightforward, have your architect or contractor do it for you, but if you have a project where it’s either non standard or the rules aren’t clear and you want to build legally, I’d say contact them!

I am in the middle of a contentious battle with unrealistic neighbors over a home addition. Jeremy Paul has been handling every battle with a calm professionalism and delivering victory at every stage. He is known as the best in San Francisco and I understand first hand why he has earned that reputation.

Quickdraw navigated the tricky permit process for legalizing a basement rental unit with low ceilings, no parking space and other issues. Note: I was the buyer of the property and not the direct customer, but Jeremy was awesome when I called to ask a few questions.