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I understand that on a single tenant floor you can treat the elevator lobby as Usable Area if that space is under the tenants control and could be put to use housing personnel or furniture. What about this situation: in a 10 storey building which is 100% leased to a single tenant under a single lease. Can the ground floor lobby (which would normally be Building Common) be treated as Usable Area? The lobby will house a security desk.
Hi Mark,
There is no specific answer to your question. The way I see it, there are three things to consider:
1. If you are trying to create the optic that this building is more area efficient than it is, then converting Building Service Area to Occupant Area is probably not the way to go - the Standard doesn't address building lobbies in this respect, but it does discuss restrooms on single occupant floors, and suggests these should be maintained as Floor Service Area. The same intent can be applied to your building lobby - it should probably be maintained as Building Service Area.
2. If you do decide to deem the area as Occupant Area, make sure your documentation is transparent and discuss the matter with your client so that you don't get burned by it later when the building is remeasured by another entity.
3. I don't know whether you have considered Gross Area, but this method will yield the most area from a single-tenant building. See Page 3, Paragraph 4 of the Office Standard for further clarification.