BOMA — the Building Owners and Managers Association — publishes the measurement standards used as the common basis for commercial real estate floor area reporting across North American markets. The BOMA Office Standard (ANSI/BOMA Z65.1) defines Rentable Area, Usable Area, and the loss factors derived from core and common-area deductions, establishing a shared measurement language between landlords, tenants, and brokers.

BOMA measurement is the floor area baseline for Woodfine professional centre floor plate reporting, lease documentation, and building-to-building comparison within the portfolio.

Rentable versus usable area

The BOMA standard distinguishes two primary area measures:

Usable Area is the space a tenant exclusively occupies — the demised area inside the demising walls, excluding the building core and multi-tenant common areas. It represents the space a tenant configures and operates.

Rentable Area adds a proportionate share of the building's common areas — lobbies, corridors, service areas — to the Usable Area, producing the area against which the lease rate is applied. The ratio of Rentable to Usable Area (the "load factor" or "loss factor") reflects how efficiently the building converts gross area to tenant-exclusive use.

Woodfine fixed floor plates are designed to optimize the Rentable-to-Usable ratio by minimizing the core footprint relative to the plate's total area. A smaller building core relative to the plate produces a lower load factor, meaning tenants obtain more Usable Area per unit of Rentable Area paid.

Floor plate subdivisions and BOMA modules

Floor plate subdivisions — 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, and full floor — are measured and leased on a BOMA Rentable Area basis. Each subdivision's Rentable Area is derived from the Usable Area of the demised portion plus the subdivision's proportionate share of the building's common areas.

Because the Key Plans and Tiles system defines subdivision boundaries at tile module boundaries — not at arbitrary points — each subdivision produces a geometrically clean BOMA Rentable Area calculation without fractional module remnants.

BOMA and building class classification

The BOMA standard is also associated with the Class A / Class B / Class C building classification framework, which describes qualitative building characteristics rather than area measurements. Class A buildings are the highest-quality tier: modern systems, professional management, and positioning in the upper portion of the local rental rate range. Woodfine professional centres are designed and managed to the Class A standard — the BOMA area measurement framework and the Class A quality positioning are complementary components of the same institutional real estate benchmark.

International BOMA equivalents

European markets use measurement standards from the RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) and the TEGoVA (The European Group of Valuers' Associations) rather than BOMA directly. For international deployments outside North America, the equivalent measurement standard of the applicable jurisdiction governs lease area reporting, with crosswalks to BOMA Rentable Area provided for portfolio-level comparisons. The fixed floor plate is pre-certified against the applicable measurement standard for each prototype class's target jurisdiction.