The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) released its first Standard Method of Floor Measurement for Office Buildings in 1915. A lot has changed in the past 100 years: there were two world wars, man landed on the moon, and an underground unicorn lair was discovered in North Korea (yes, the Korean Central News Agency actually reported this in 2012…). BOMA has evolved with the times and now offers measurement standards for a multitude of property types including office, industrial, retail, multi-unit residential and mixed use.
The BOMA Office Standard is by far the most recognised and implemented standard in the market. It provides a logical and uniform method for measuring office space, including the proportionate allocation of all floor and building common areas in a building. The existence and general idea of the standard is fairly well known in the industry but what is far less understood is the huge financial impact that a BOMA space certification can have on your asset.
For years I have been telling clients that you are not buy a building – you are buying an income stream … and your income stream is rooted in your rent roll. Therefore if your building has not been certified in accordance with the appropriate BOMA Standard, chances are that the area on your rent roll is wrong. How wrong you ask? Well we undertook an audit of office buildings in Atlantic Canada and found the average area shown in the lease was off by 10.1% (!!!). The financial implications are enormous. An 80,000 ft.2 office building sitting in a market where net rents are running at $12.00/ft.2 could be undervalued by as much as $1,100,000; simply because it had not been certified.
If a full scale building certification is more than you need, you should at the very least consider getting individual units certified during lease renewals/roll overs. For “one off” units of 5,000 ft.2 or less, a space certification costs only a few hundred dollars and is often turned around in less than 24 hours: a small price to pay for the peace of mind which comes with a properly certified unit which last you a lifetime (or at least the term of the lease). Space measurement provides you with tremendous bang-for-buck as the floor plans generated during the space certification can also be used for marketing the unit, as a fire exit plan, or for space planning purposes. Most importantly, an accurately measured building will ensure better performance of your building.
At the end of the day, the rent roll for a building that hasn’t been certified is about as reliable as a news report about North Korean unicorns.
Questions regarding space measurement? Feel free to contact Mark Turner, Vice President of our Lasercad Division at (902) 429-1811 or .
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