What is BOMA?
BOMA is an American National Standard developed under the auspices of the Building Owners and Managers Association International and endorsed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), of which BOMA-International is a member, and the ANSI Standards Certified Developer.
Originally published in 1915, the standard was conceived as a measurement method used by building owners, managers, facility managers, occupants, appraisers, design professionals, measurement professionals, leasing professionals, lending institutions and others to calculate rentable square footage in office buildings throughout the United States, Canada and has spread to many countries.
What is the standard used for?
The standard is recommended for commercial, office, industrial or residential space and is useful to both tenants and landlords for:
- managing the use of the space;
- benchmarking;
- allocating building costs to different cost centres.
Measurement methods
It is common for a floor area calculated according to building plans (paper plans or CAD) to differ from the floor area measured on site using field measurements.
It is also common for field measurements and calculation of the floor area made by one party to differ from the same field measurements and calculation made by another party.
The calculation of a floor area resulting from the field measurement by the building owner or manager is considered accurate if a re-measurement yields a result with a variation of two per cent (2%) or less. If the variation is greater than two per cent (2%), BOMA-International recommends that an independent professional third party be called in to help resolve the problem.
It is imperative that all measurements are fully documented. One of the hallmarks of superior property and amenity management is good documentation of floor areas, which provides accurate, reliable and verifiable calculations of rentable area.
In order to have all the data on the ground GRAPHEIN uses a unique building surveying methodology that combines classical precision surveying with state-of-the-art technology such as 3D scanning. 3D scanning offers the chance to get the complete terrain information, with millions of measured points the information collected in a point cloud helps to create 2D level plans, facades or even 3D models in .ifc format.
For this project the beneficiary requested that for the measurement and calculation of surfaces the standard “Gross surfaces of a building: Standard Methods of Measurement (ANSI/BOMA/Z65.3-2009)”.
The other BOMA standards that have appeared are:
- BOMA2017 for Office Buildings: Standard Methods of Measurement (ANSI/BOMA Z65.1-2017]
- Industrial Buildings: Standard Methods of Measurement (ANSI/BOMA Z65.2 – 2012)
- Multi-Unit Residential Buildings: Standard Methods of Measurement (ANSI/BOMA Z65.4 – 2010)
- Commercial Buildings: Standard Methods of Measurement (ANSI/BOMAZ65.5 – 2010)
- Mixed-Use Properties: Standard Methods of Measurement (ANSI/BOMA Z65.6 – 2012)
- INFOHALE.ro article