Traditionally, every country has set its own standards for how to measure and analyze office buildings. In the United States, the rules set by the Building Owners and Managers Association -- BOMA -- govern the intricacies of measuring space. Globally, though, measurements vary so much that a space that is 6,500 square feet in one part of the world could measure 8,060 square feet elsewhere. The new International Property Measurement Standard (IPMS) for Office Buildings is an attempt to correct this problem.
Measuring Office Buildings
Actually figuring out how much space an office building has to offer is a relatively complicated process. A question as basic as whether you measure from the outside of the outside wall or the inside of the outside wall can have a significant impact on the total size of each floor. Every part of the measurement process can be governed by rules that impact how big the space is and how much rent the tenants will pay. Here are some of the questions that you could have to ask as you look at space in different countries:
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Are vertical penetrations (like elevator shafts or staircases) included in the total area of my floor?
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Do semi-outdoor areas, such as covered walkways or patios, count?
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Are parking areas included in the total space of office buildings in a given area?
Some countries have rules that you might never think to ask about. For example, your office's total space could include the area of an outdoor swimming pool in a building-tied exercise facility. In some parts of the world, you could even end up paying rent on a building's theoretical maximum area instead of on its actual area.
Two Problems
The first problem with inconsistent standards is relatively obvious. You don't know what you're getting -- or what you're paying rent on. Unless you know each country's specific rules and practices, the only way to be sure that a 697 square meter (7,500 square foot) space in Alexandria, Egypt is actually bigger than a 6,500 square foot space in Alexandria, Virginia is to measure both. Needless to say, this adds an extra level of complexity to planning out a global corporate real estate portfolio.
However, beyond the challenge of determining your space's size and rent costs, varying measurement standards pose a different problem. They also make it hard to benchmark your portfolio for efficiency. When two sales offices are on the books at 3,000 square feet, sales per square foot or space-based energy usage metrics become meaningless when they are actually wildly different sizes.
The IPMS
In an attempt to solve this problem, representatives of over 140 countries banded together to create a new set of measurement standards. The IPMS system actually has three different sets of rules for office buildings and landlords can choose one. For instance, a space in Paris that is measured using the IPMS 1 standard will be the same as one in Perth that is calculated using IPMS 1. What this means is that, moving forward, you could only have to deal with four transparent standards to understand a building's footprint -- BOMA in the United States and the three flavors of the IPMS office building standard.
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