First-Pass Approval Secrets: What Reviewers Actually Look For (But Never Tell You)

If you’ve ever stared at a stack of redlines wondering, “What do these people actually want from me?” — this one’s for you. Most contractors think plan review is some mysterious black box run by grumpy people in a back room who hate schedules, freedom, and the hard working people in their city.

Reality is simpler: reviewers have a very specific job, and once you understand what they’re actually protecting, your first-pass approval rate goes up and your stress level goes down. This article is the “inside baseball” version — not theory, but what we hear over and over from planners, engineers, and building officials behind closed doors.

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, there are a few bad-day reviewers, but No, the city is not sitting around trying to kill your job. Their job is to interpret the code and protect the public — safety, long-term liability, and the city’s legal exposure. If you send in a set that puts the city on the hook when something goes wrong, they’re going to slam the brakes. Every time. Once you start seeing review comments as, “Where does this set expose the city?” instead of, “Why do they hate me?”, your whole approach changes.

The Unwritten Rules (That Explain 80% of Rejections)

These almost never show up in the code book, but they rule your review:

1. Clarity beats beauty. A clean, boring, obvious plan set will beat a gorgeous, confusing one every day. If a reviewer has to flip through 9 sheets to answer a simple question, you’re in trouble.

2. Completeness beats creativity. “We’ll figure it out in the field” is code for “Expect a correction letter.” If it’s important for safety, zoning, or operations, it needs to be on the sheet — not in your head.

3. Consistency is non-negotiable. If the site plan says one thing, the landscape plan says another, and the civil shows a third version of reality? Automatic delay. Reviewers hate contradictions more than mistakes.

4. Liability is king. Any time a detail is vague, unusual, or high-risk, they ask one question:“If this fails, does it look like the city signed off?”If yes, you’re getting a comment.

5. They are not your designer. The city’s job is to check compliance, not design your retaining wall, electrical riser, or fire-rated assembly. If your plan relies on them “helping you figure it out,” expect friction.

Once you respect those rules, everything else is just code and coordination.

What the Planner Never Tells You

The planner’s world is land use, compatibility, and politics — not in a drama sense, but in the “what does this project do to the neighborhood and adopted plans” sense.

What they quietly care about:

• Is this use allowed here — and is it justified? They’re looking at zoning, General Plan, overlays, and special districts. If you’re asking for a rezone or a Conditional Use Permit, they want a narrative that answers:“Why is this good for the community, not just good for you?” Being lazy in your explanations will sink you.

• Does the site layout respect the rules of the game? Setbacks, heights, lot coverage, buffers next to residential, open space, parking counts, landscape strips, screening walls — all the stuff “nobody reads” in the zoning ordinance. Missing a basic item (setback label, building height, parking count) isn’t “no big deal.” It says, “We didn’t bother.”

• Does the paperwork match reality? Wrong project name copied from another job, missing legal description, outdated forms, missing neighborhood meeting summary — these aren’t clerical errors to them. They’re process failures that can invalidate hearings or ordinances.

• Is this going to blow up at a council meeting? If your design ignores obvious neighbor impacts (lighting, noise, buffering, traffic cut-through), the planner knows who gets screamed at: them. So they’ll force mitigation before it ever hits the agenda.

If you want planners on your side, give them what they need to safely say, “This fits our code and our community story.”

What the Engineer Never Tells You

In permit-world when you hear someone say “the engineer,” they usually mean civil/traffic/stormwater. These folks care about one thing: Can the public safely drive, park, and survive rain here without suing us later?

Some of their quiet hot buttons:

• Stormwater and grading space. If your site plan uses every square foot for building and parking and magically forgets detention/retention, you’re setting yourself up for a redesign. The engineer is thinking: “Where does the water go in a 100-year storm?”

• Driveway location and circulation. That pretty front driveway you love? If it’s too close to an intersection, doesn’t align with the driveway across the street, or destroys sight distance triangles, traffic engineering is going to shred it.

• Utilities and easements. Sewer under a future building, water line in the wrong easement, missing fire line details — these feel “small” to a lot of designers, but to the engineer they scream future emergency + angry utility department.

Bottom line: coordination is king. One mismatch between sheets can burn an entire review cycle.

What the Building Reviewer Really Cares About

The building reviewer’s job is simple to describe and brutal to ignore: Don’t let a building go up that burns, collapses, traps people, or locks anyone out who should be able to get in. So while everyone else is arguing about setbacks and drive aisles, the building reviewer is asking:

• Occupancy & exiting

  • Did you classify the building correctly?

  • Are there enough exits, in the right locations, with the right travel distances?

  • Do the doors swing the right way and have proper hardware?

• Construction type, structure, and fire protection

  • Does the building’s size/height match its construction type and sprinklers?

  • Are rated walls, shafts, and separations clearly called out with real UL assemblies, not “1-HR TBD”?

  • Has someone taken responsibility for the unusual conditions or design?

• Accessibility

  • Is there a continuous accessible route from parking or sidewalk to the front door?

  • Are restrooms, doors, ramps, and parking stalls actually laid out to work — not just labeled “ADA compliant”?

• Interior safety details

  • Guardrails, stair geometry, emergency lighting, exit signs, appliance clearances — the small stuff that fails inspections and gets people hurt.

• Mechanical Electrical Plumbing (MEP)

  • They don’t care if your RTUs are pretty. They care if the loads, voltages, and pipe sizes all match between mechanical, electrical, structural, and plumbing.

  • If the mechanical schedule calls for a 5 HP motor and the electrical shows 3 HP, that’s an instant “Nope.”

  • If a design relies on exotic systems with no local techs to maintain them, they see future callbacks, not innovation.

If you’re trying to be “creative” in any of those areas, expect the reviewer to plant a big red flag and ask for a registered design professional to own the risk.

The City’s Biggest Fear: Being Left Holding the Bag

Here’s the real secret nobody says out loud: when something fails — a retaining wall, a drainage system, a fire separation — lawyers go hunting for whoever left a paper trail, and if the approved plans look vague, contradictory, or incomplete, it suddenly appears the city approved a bad design. That’s why reviewers push so hard for clear lines of responsibility with registered professionals stamping anything unusual, explicit code paths and assemblies for fire and life safety, and clean, consistent plan sets with no “we’ll figure it out later.” If you want first-pass approvals, your job is to make it unmistakably clear that the design team owns the risk and the city is simply confirming compliance — nothing more, nothing less.

Quick First-Pass Checklist by Discipline

This isn’t the full cookbook (that’s what we built our tools on), but here’s the 80/20 version you can use before you hit “submit”:

Planning / Zoning

Is the use clearly allowed and justified, all standards labeled and compliant, every sheet telling the same story, and all required "extras" (landscape, lighting, fancy elevations, zoning data) included?

Civil / Site Engineering

Does the plan clearly show stormwater management, place driveways safely, locate utilities and easements without future conflicts, and provide at least a conceptual layout for fire access?

Building / Life Safety

Are occupancies and occupant loads shown and reasonable, egress compliant, fire-rated assemblies properly designated, accessibility fully drawn, equipment and electrical schedules aligned, and deferred submittals identified?

If you can’t confidently say “yes” to those, your first-review odds just dropped.

Where First Reviews Usually Go Sideways

In our experience, most first-pass failures come from a few predictable sins:

• A thin or lazy narrative/scope of work 

• A site plan that pretends stormwater, drive aisles, and fire access are someone else’s problem

• Cross-discipline mismatches (civil vs. landscape vs. architectural vs. mechanical vs. electrical)

• “We’ll detail it later” on anything that touches structure, fire, or accessibility

• Basic zoning data missing from the plan set (parking counts, coverage, heights, etc.)

None of those require a genius to fix — they just require someone to look at the set the way a reviewer does before the city does.

How We Use This “Inside Baseball” For You

We’ve spent hours interviewing planners, engineers, and building officials and turning their unwritten rules into structured checklists and review logic. Then we built a pre-submittal review around it.

We call it the AI Pre-Check

Instead of guessing what the city might say, we run your project through the same lenses:

• Planning/zoning compliance and narrative strength

• Civil/site red-flags (drainage, access, utilities)

• MEP coordination gaps that cause expensive RFIs

• Building code and life-safety “gotchas” that derail approvals

You get a clear punch list of first-pass killers before the plans ever leave your office — so you can fix the problems cheaply, on your schedule, instead of under a correction deadline.

If You Want Higher First-Pass Approval Rates

You can absolutely do this yourself:

• Read your plans like a nervous city attorney.

• Read your narrative like a planner facing an angry neighborhood meeting.

• Read your life-safety sheets like a building official imagining a fire at 2 a.m..

Or, if you’d rather stay focused on building and let someone else think like the reviewer:

Send the next project through a AI Pre-Check

We’ll tell you what they’re going to care about — before they ever see it.