The Office Standard is intended to measure Office Buildings and Life Science Buildings that flex between Office and Laboratory space. BOMA Recommends it’s use for buildings that are at least half Office Occupants without any warehouse flex use or any residential use. Measurements based on the 1996, 2010, 2017, and 2024 Office Standards are available from Solid Tech as well as many other methodologies.

The Rentable Area is found through the measurement of all the service area and amenity areas (common area) in the building and allocated on a proportional basis to the occupants. The ratio for the proportional allocation is called a load factor, and is determined by measuring the occupant area for all the tenants in the building.

There are two ways given in the standard to calculate the load factor, Method A or Method B and the standard requires the method chosen to be disclosed.

Method A is the legacy method most used, it results in a rentable area unique to the common area loads of each space in the building.

Method B is a single unified load factor. All the common area is grouped together and allocated to all occupants of the building equally.

Both measurements result in the same total rentable area, but the rentable area for individual occupants will vary under these two methods.

This is typically a market driven decision for landlords. With some exceptions like New York City, Great Britain, Hong Kong, and Australia, standardized measurements are used due to market demand and to provide fairness in comparable measurements. BOMA does not retire old versions of the standard and landlord’s are often able to choose which standard they wish to use and stick with until the choose to change and begin rolling leases over to a new updated measurement.

You can purchase the standards from BOMA.org. Trying to piece together how to perform a BOMA analysis from internet research is not advisable since the number of standards makes this impossible.

Solid Tech offers classes. You can learn more here. Or you can reach out to us for expert consulting and reports on your project. Contact@goSolidTech.com

Read about the latest BOMA 2024 Office Standard from our article published in the Colorado Real Estate Journal.