One building, one system, and a different tenant every year

Either works and the wrong answer is having no answer. Landlord issuance gives the building one clean list and a defensible record of who was inside at any hour, at the cost of tenants having to ask for changes. Tenant issuance gives them responsiveness and gives the landlord less visibility. Larger tenants usually push for their own; smaller ones usually prefer not to. Decide it per building, write it into the lease with your counsel, and configure the system to match.

Common, and often reasonable, particularly for tenants with their own compliance obligations. Two things need settling before it happens. Anything that ties into base building life safety, such as door release on fire alarm, is not a tenant decision because it affects egress for the whole building. And somebody has to own what happens at lease end, otherwise the next tenant inherits hardware nobody has credentials for. Both belong in the work letter rather than in an email during the fit-out.

Scoping the life safety work at the same time as everything else instead of after the drawings are done. The pattern is almost always identical: the fire alarm modification is treated as a small electrical item, priced late against a superseded drawing set, and then turns out to require design, submittal, and inspection with real lead times on both ends. Bringing it into the conversation at the start costs nothing and removes the item that most often sits between a finished suite and a rent commencement date.

Generally yes, and it is usually the right compromise. A tenant who can see activity on their own boundary stops asking for administrative rights over the building, and the owner keeps one coherent system. What that looks like in practice depends on the platform, so it is worth deciding what you want to offer tenants before selecting one rather than discovering the limits afterward.

Treat them as the higher risk period rather than the quiet one. Vacant space is where trades work unsupervised, doors get propped, base building systems get disturbed, and nobody is present who would notice any of it. Practically that means the space stays within the intrusion partitioning rather than being switched out of it, the fire alarm devices in it remain live and monitored, and any contractor access is credentialed and time limited like any other vendor.

It changes the implementation rather than the standard. Pathways, ceiling access, wall construction, and what may be attached to a protected surface all constrain the design, and there is usually a preservation dimension to negotiate alongside the code one. This region has a lot of these buildings and they reward being surveyed properly before anybody produces a price, because the cheap assumption is nearly always wrong in the same expensive direction.

With an honest inventory, which in a multi tenant building is more valuable than it sounds. What is installed, what still reports, which tenants have arrangements nobody documented, and who currently holds credentials for what. Taking over is ordinary work and rarely means replacing panels. The first useful deliverable is usually a plain statement of who can open which doors, because in buildings that have turned over a few times, nobody can answer that from memory.