Commercial building measurement standard could meet resistance from owners

A proposed new standard method to measure commercial buildings throughout the world is likely to find resistance among some building owners.

The International Property Measurement Standards Coalition plans to announce a single measurement system for the global office market in June 2014.

The effort is meant to address one of the biggest complaints of office tenants: that building owners throughout the world use different systems for measuring how many square feet or square meters tenants rent. The different methods in use today can deviate as much as 24% from one another.

For some building owners, a new measurement standard could mean that their building would shrink in size and lose value.

“There is a risk that some firms may be sitting on balance sheets that are actually worth significantly less when measured by a common standard,” Scott McMillan, chief of real estate at the International Monetary Fund, told the Wall Street Journal.

The new standard will be voluntary, so building owners are not obligated to follow it. But, tenants could pressure them by avoiding leasing with owners that fail to adopt it.

(http://www.wsj.com/articles/building-owners-brace-for-common-approach-to-measuring-office-space-1401231827?mod=residential_real_estate)

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.