Where to look for a commercial/ residential property?

[Ray Ngo]

Hi BP community, 

Our family has been leasing a small space in Southern California since mid 2018 for our e-commerce retail business (selling heavy machineries to  end users nationwide). We have been saving up over the years in hope to buy a property in Southern California (East LA, Inland Empire, San Diego, ...) where we can both reside and conduct business in our backyard/ front yard. For the residential space, we are not necessarily tied up to a A neighborhood with good schools. A decent 4-bed, 3-bath property in a B-grade neighborhood would work out great for us. But the tough part is that we don't know where to look online to verify that the county/ city would permit us to conduct business. Does it have to be zoned commercial plus residential for us to both reside and operate or business? Do we call the city's planning commission to confirm? Does county/ city typically change zoning out of the blue, and they can literally force us out of business by re-zoning the land to residential only in the future? I would really, really appreciate any online resources/ books/ podcasts on this topic! 

A little background of our business. We typically need 3,500 - 4,000 sqft of open space (no need for a roof as long as we stay in SoCal) in the backyard to take photographs, store, and service our machineries (small, compact 5,000 to 12,000 lbs weight excavators). Also, to move our machines from the front yard to backyard, the door entry must be at least 7-foot wide. We receive a container (40-foot in length, 8.5-foot high, and 8-foot wide) every 5 weeks from overseas, and we partner with a drayage company to deliver this container to our property via a semi tractor trailer (so the road must allow access for these types of trucks). We ship out these machines to our customers via LTL trucking (most of them are 3/4 to 1 ton pick up trucks with 35-foot gooseneck trailers). 

Please let me know your thoughts/ comments if anyone has any experiences on this topic. Much appreciated!