Certify ONLY One Office Space Within a Building?

Michelle: Yes, I'm afraid EBOM is only for whole buildings or groups of buildings. It intentionally excludes parts of buildings, including individual tenant spaces. At this time existing tenant spaces have no option to certify in LEED on their own.

Hi Michelle, of course you have the LEED for Commercial Interiors (LEED CI) route. You might want to do a feasibility analysis on it and see how the space does. Depending on the conditions and efficiency of the space it may not be too bad.

Jeff, to use CI, the tenant must be renovating at least 60% of floor area to be certified. If there is no renovation, as Michelle indicated, CI isn't an option. Michelle, there currently isn't an existing-buildings certification option for individual tenants, aside from convincing a building owner to do EBOM. (Our own office is in a similar situation: the two floors of our office are CI Gold and Platinum, and we would like to be in an EBOM-certified office, but the building owner isn't interested.)

At the risk of sounding like a traitor, BREEAM In-Use (part 3) does allow for the certification of individual tenant spaces. Overall, I'm not a big fan of BREEAM In-Use because I don't feel its three part format creates the same impact as EBOM. That said, it is actually much easier (and cheaper) to achieve a BREEAM In-Use rating because it has one rating for the building, one for the building management and a third for the tenant. That said, the part 3 rating probably requires a tenant to act more sustainably than EBOM does. It is a good add-on to a CI rating. This link gives a good overview of the rating system: http://www.breeam.org/filelibrary/BREEAM%20In%20Use/BES_5058_Issue_1_2_BREEAM_In_Use.pdf

"In life you usually get what you pay for", but for sophisticated users BREEAM In Use does provide a benchmark pretty quickly where a property stands. Then you've got a lot of work to do (with no real support or examples from BREEAM on what you should do) to become more sustainable. The link posted didn't work for me, this one might work better - http://www.breeam.org/page.jsp?id=295