RICS launches new guide for land measurement.
This new guide seeks to facilitate land measurement for construction projects.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has published a new guide on measuring land for development projects, such as new homes and commercial developments, which defines common measurements used throughout the built environment and associated metrics, such as density.
Tony Mulhall MRICS, Associate Director of the Land Professional Group at RICS, said: “This guide offers a consistent way to measure land, whether it’s delivering desperately needed housing, new infrastructure, or preparing empty spaces for future development.”
The guide is now available and will be used by planners, surveyors, developers, architects, government and legal administrators around the world.
What is the new guide for land measurement about?
Entitled ‘Land Measurement for Planning and Development Purposes’, it provides clear definitions for widely used measurements in the property and built environment sectors, and advocates for consistency around the world. RICS has now formalized five basic definitions to assist with global land measurement, which are:
- Land ownership area (LOA): an area of land, measured in a horizontal plane, held in a single legal interest or title by one or more legal owners, which may be the subject of a sale, lease, or other proposal actual or proposed mandatory sale, valuation or purchase, and that may comprise all or part of that single interest or legal title.
- Site Area (SA): the total area of land on which development authorization is requested, measured on a horizontal plane.
- Net Development Area (NDA): the extent of the Site Area on which one or more buildings or other operations can be built and their ancillary space, measured on a horizontal plane.
- Parcel ratio (PR): the ratio between the total development floor area and SA. The development floor area can be measured as gross external area (GEA) or gross internal area (GIA), but it must be clearly indicated what is used or modifications to them.
- Floor Area Ratio (FAR) and Floor Space Ratio (FSR) are similar terms, used interchangeably in some jurisdictions to refer to the same point. For consistency, PR should be used whenever possible. When the jurisdictional requirements are for the use of FAR or FSR, the PR must also be informed.
- Site coverage (SC): the ratio of the ground floor area (measured according to GEA) and SA, expressed as a percentage.
A key difference from the new guidelines is that density calculations must now always be expressed in terms of gross density (based on SA), rather than on a net basis, and net density provides an additional and complementary metric for understanding intensity of the development of a site.
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