News
First Consultation with Building Professional Institutions / Stakeholder Organisations on the Common Methodologies adopted for General Building Plan Submission in Building Information Modelling Format to the Buildings Department and the Lands Department
Under the current practice, when General Building Plans (GBPs) of a proposed private development project are submitted to the Buildings Department (BD) for approval through the centralised processing system, the Authorized Person of the project is required to demonstrate on the GBPs that certain area parameters of the proposed development, such as gross floor area (GFA) and site coverage (SC), are complied with the Buildings Ordinance (BO) and its subsidiary regulations as well as the relevant lease conditions. The pre-requisites/requirements on the use of computer for calculating floor areas of buildings in the preparation of GBPs are specified in the Lands Department (LandsD)’s Land Administration Office Practice Note No. 3/2018 and BD’s Practice Note for Authorized Persons, Registered Structural Engineers and Registered Geotechnical Engineers ADM-19.
To promote the wider and fuller use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology in the building industry of Hong Kong, LandsD and BD has jointly commissioned a consultancy study to develop BIM plug-in tools to enable the building stakeholders and the Government to extract different floor areas from the BIM models for verification of the area parameters shown on GBPs in BIM format are in compliance with the BO and its subsidiary regulations, and the lease requirements. The Common Methodologies (CM) of area calculations for GBP submission in BIM format will set out common standards and specifications to be adopted by LandsD and BD for computing, defining and verifying the GFA/SC/usable floor area/usable floor space shown on the GBPs in BIM format.
In view of this, LandsD and BD invited nine building professional institutions and stakeholder organisations to offer comments on the proposed CM. LandsD and BD also jointly hosted two consultation sessions on 20 and 27 September 2021, giving consultees a clear view of the proposal and inviting comments from stakeholders on the proposed CM before publishing a final version.
Please refer to the video and briefing materials (English version only) 
below to find out more about the first consultation.
You are most welcome to let us have your views after the consultation sessions. Please send your responses by 18 October 2021 to the following email address:
gbpbim_consultation@landsd.gov.hk
