- Laurie B Barham
- Barham Architects, LLC
- August 24, 2018
In reading Boma 2017 for office buildings, everything seems to assume multi-tenant or multi-floor. We have a building which is being designed for a specific single medical tenant. In determining rentable and usable, what areas are excluded? I assume restrooms, janitorial, mechanical and electrical, waste disposal.
In a medical clinic, would patient and staff restrooms be excluded as well as those in waiting/public areas?
Do I have to worry about floor circulation areas in this case? In this case, all corridors service patient and staff areas, as well as some of the excluded areas. How do I determine which corridors to exclude and how much of those corridors?
- David Fingret
- Extreme Measures Inc.
- August 27, 2018
Hi Laurie,
The 2017 BOMA Office Standard does not assume only multi-tenant scenarios.
Page 5 reads:
"This standard is intended exclusively for Office Buildings and their associated structures and may be applied to single tenant, multi-tenant, or multi-building configurations."
Page 5 continues....
"This standard is primarily designed to generate leasing figures based on Rentable Area according to
the provisions herein. It may be used for Buildings leased to a single tenant without any other special
considerations; however, for Buildings leased to a single tenant on a gross area basis, the latest BOMA Gross
Areas of a Building Standard should be applied."
There are also numerous comments about single tenant floors vs. multi tenant floor throughout the document and illustrations at the end of section 3 which show both scenarios.
In any event, no areas of the building (within the Boundary Are) are excluded in rentable area except for Major Vertical Penetrations, Parking, Occupant Storage and Publicly accessible Covered Galleries. Restrooms, janitorial, mechanical, electrical and waste disposal are all included in the rentable area as well as patient and staff restrooms. There are no special rules for medical clinics or any other type of office building. Floor circulation areas are all included and should be allocated as Floor Circulation Area. In some cases, it is possible that the corridor is part of tenant area, depending on whether it is under the control of the landlord or tenant.
The publication provides everything you should need in order to successfully analyze the building and produce a Global Summary of Areas chart, but it must be read in it's entirety.