Historically, the seemingly basic task of measuring office spaces has been governed by a set of rules issued by the Building Owners and Managers Association. BOMAs measurement specs serve as brokerage and property management standards across the United States, defining exactly how to determine a building's usable and rentable areas. However, BOMA's influence has generally not extended past the US's borders.
Led by the British Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, 50 different organizations across the world that are involved in setting property management standards and other rules for the commercial real estate industry have banded together to create a brand new set of International Property Measurement Standards. Due to be released in November of 2014, the IPMS will give the rest of the world the benefit that the American market receives from having its own set of standards.
Measuring a building isn't as simple as it seems:
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Should the building's perimeter be measured from the outside or inside edge of the wall?
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Does foundation size have any impact on a building's stated size since, after all, a bigger foundation means that a building could have a greater area at some point in the future?
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Are stairwells, air shafts and elevators part of a building's rentable area, or should they be excluded?
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How should parking areas be treated -- whether outdoor lots or enclosed indoor spaces?
The IPMS helps to bring standardized answers to these questions, letting your company look at spaces in London, Lisbon and Kuala Lumpur all on the same basis. This enables to you to not only comparison shop more easily but also to plan spaces with a greater degree of certainty that you will get what you expect to.
Along with other property management standards, the IPMS also enables better benchmarking between spaces. Once you can clearly define a space's size, you can begin to calculate per square foot (or per square meter) metrics for efficiency, employee density, energy consumption and cost. Doing this helps you to globally optimize your real estate portfolio.
As the International Property Management Standards system comes into effect, you will begin to see spaces marked with which IPMS spec they follow. This lets you quickly and directly compare IPMS 1 spaces against each other, or to compare IPMS 2 and 3 spaces by simply adjusting for the easily-determined differences in their measurements. This will ultimately bring the simplicity of the American BOMA standards to the global real estate market.
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