Hi Eliot,

The master planning project consists of two parcels with three highrise buildings. All the buildings are designed as highend office towers located on the waterfront of Shanghai business disctrict. The developer will have property ownership up till final completion of the project, then the property ownership of each building will be transferred to a landlord or multiple landlords respectively upon certificate of occupancy. From that point, all the building spaces will be leased and occupied by various individual tenants, but none of the tenants will have property ownership of any project buildings. I want to inquire if these three buildings should pursue LEED NC or LEED CS ?

A secondary question in relation to the above question is that I'm confused about the term "occupied" addressed in LEED, such that a project can be qualified for LEED CS when the owner (in this case would be the developer not the landlord, correct?)"occupies" 50% or less of the building's leasable square footage. Is the term "Occupy" equivalent to Property Ownership ? If this is the case, then a project with an owner(regardless of developer or landlord) who owns the entire property of the project building, but doesn't physically occupy any portion of the building space, should pursue LEED NC since 100% ownership = 100% occupancy, correct?