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I cannot imagine any building owner wanting to go with this latest Standard and lose the dripline area, I know none of our clients will be happy with that. Curious what the reasoning was? I know we will be asked.
Hi Steve,
The BOMA Floor Measurement Committee removed the concept of Drip Line because there was too much uncertainty around it. It was questioned whether the original intent was to include all areas under the roof, regardless of the surface underneath it.
The doubt was primarily focused on the definition of "Drip Line Area" in the previous industrial standard, which states:
"The total of all the horizontal floor areas (as viewed on a floor plan) of all floors of a building contained within their drip lines...”
Furthermore, the definition of "floor" states:
"a normally horizontal, load bearing structure and constituting the bottom level of each story..."
These two definitions suggest that a load bearing floor is required to be under the roof in order to be included as rentable area.
It was determined that the Drip Line Method was not consistently applied by all members of the committee. Consequently, the concept was determined to be too ambiguous and the term "Drip Line" was considered too misleading.
There was a desire to have a single unified methodology so that the standard would not yield two different rentable areas. In order to move forward with this unified method, it was critical to remove the concept of "Drip Line" in order to clarify that areas under the roof which do not support "Industrial Activities" are excluded from rentable area since they serve no functional purpose and therefore have no value to a tenant. No other BOMA Standard includes space that isn't usable in some way.
It should be noted that the new standard does allow Overhang Areas to be included in Rentable Area if it’s agreed to in a lease agreement. The standard states “Overhang Area may be proportionately allocated to Occupants using Building Service Area or Inter-Building Service Area if agreed by all parties in the lease. When using this methodology, it must be noted in the Global Summary of Areas and in all associated lease documents that the Overhang Area was classified as either Building Service Area or Inter-Building Service Area.”
The new standard does provide other new concepts which will increase the Rentable Area. For example, the lowest levels of stairs, elevators and shafts are all included in Rentable Area, like they are in the BOMA Office 2017 standard. Also, as mentioned above, the requirement of a "Floor" is replaced with the concept of supporting "Industrial Activities". This provides more opportunities to not only include additional areas of value to tenants but to also include other types of Industrial Buildings that do not have load bearing floors.
Most notably however, is that buildings with a covered loading dock or other covered area supporting Industrial Activities will certainly increase in Rentable Area when compared to Method A of the previous standard. Also, every multi-story industrial building will increase in Rentable Area due to the inclusion of stairs, elevators and shafts at their lowest level.
The previous standard suffered from several inconsistencies and irregularities which we believe make it difficult to support any longer. The new BOMA Industrial Standard resolves all of these issues and we will be strongly recommending the new BOMA 2019 Industrial standard to all of our clients because we feel it will be beneficial to all parties involved.
Thanks,
David