“This building has a Route C design and we must find tenants soon…” This is what I have been hearing recently from owners and office tenant brokers of large-scale buildings scheduled to be completed in 2012 and 2013.

The “Route C design” means that the building’s fire resistance and evacuation safety design approval is being attained through the “Route C” path, which includes receiving approval from the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. Adoption of this special performance-based design approval method has increased even for large-scale buildings with large floor space per floor following the revision of the Building Standards Law in 2000.

The benefits include not having to provide excessive evacuation facilities and heightened flexibility in planning since the verification of the safety of individual buildings can be conducted using computer simulation. Conversely, even a slight change in the positioning of a wall will require a massive recalculation of the simulation. Thus in order to reflect the desires of future occupants, tenants must be decided about two years prior to a building’s completion.

Even so, vacancy rates remain high and the economic uncertainty makes it extremely difficult for building owners and tenant companies to envision the situation two years or more into the future. Many large-scale buildings are scheduled to be completed in 2012. If the determination of tenants is delayed, there may be an increase in cases where tenants that are determined close to the scheduled completion of the building will be unable to revise layouts as they want, or cases where tenants are not able to move in at the scheduled time of completion due to the additional time needed to attain Route C design approval.

(Yasuko Oka)