Office Buildings and Planning Rules

The effect of recent planning rules on the scale and character of new building developments in the central business district of a city has been investigated. Relationships between characteristics such as gross floor area, rentable floor area, number of levels, rentals, site value, and building value were investigated for a group of fifty-two office buildings in the city of Melbourne, and all were found to be well-described as simple functions of site area. Average gross floor area per level showed a trend towards an upper limit of about 1600 m², whereas the proportion of the site area used by the typical tower block construction was shown to be a function of the size of the site, and was not influenced by bonus floor areas allowed for building setbacks. Expected return on a building that is in accord with all the trends found in the study is shown to have a minimum value for buildings on a site area of 1500 m².