Many folks are familiar with BOMA Standards for Office Buildings because it was the Gold Standard for measuring and calculating Useable/Rentable Square Footage for many years. As I have mentioned before there are actually six BOMA Measurement Standards and today I would like to focus on the most used standard in Austin: The BOMA Standard for Retail Buildings (ANSI/BOMA Z65.5-2010)
This standard (adopted in 2010) is meant to be used on any building that was constructed and/or used as a Retail facility, whether that be a strip center, mall, or stand alone building, even an old warehouse or home repurposed as a retail store uses this standard. The main difference between the Retail and Office standard is the ability for the Landlord of the building to charge for the exterior walls that enclose the space and half of the demising walls between suites. You may know that with the office standard, exterior walls are excluded from this calculation, here we get to include the outside walls.
BOMA defines the boundaries of a Retail space as the “centerline” of partitions that separate adjacent occupants, the “measure line” on the exterior surface of exterior enclosures, and the “lease line” at common areas.
Measure Line of the exterior surface will not include any decorative awnings, columns or overhangs, but it will be measured to the outside surface that forms the wall of the building even if it is covered with decorative stone or brick as long as it goes to the upper enclosure (roof or parapet) of the building and forms its enclosure.
Lease Line is defined as the final line that is formed around the entire occupant area and is used for the calculation-the Gross Leaseable Area for each tenant. This “lease line” can get unclear where that line opens to a mall. Here there is language in the standard that allows the Landlord to “define the storefront lease line” in the lease, however if no definition is provided it will revert to the leading edge of the neutral pier or mall bulk head above. When the lease line is a wall that separates the occupant from a common hallway (usually at the rear of Retail units), the tenant takes the entire wall in the calculation, but NONE of the hallway.
No common area in Retail Buildings? By these standards you are NOT ABLE TO CAPTURE ANY COMMON AREA in the stated lease square footage. It is to be excluded from the Gross Leaseable Area of the occupant area. So beware that your fire riser rooms, common corridors, shared bathrooms, janitors closets and management offices can not be included as a load factor for your Retail Tenants even if they are shared.
What can you include in the Gross Leaseable Area of your Retail tenant? In addition to the occupant space as defined above, tenants will also have to pay for their use of basements, kiosks (even located in a common area), mezzanines, occupant voids (venting to roof for example), and restricted headroom. These are defined in the standard and it is always a good idea to let the experts measure and calculate your areas if you choose to use the language of BOMA Measurement Standards in your leases.
