3D Registration of Apartment Rights Using BIM/IFC: Comparing the Cases of the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey

Abstract

Τhe built environment has a vast and ever-growing number of complex and multi-layered buildings and other structures. The number of those is growing because of the increasing pressure on the limited space in cities. It is important to note that different professional sectors are involved in the realization of a new building. These sectors are mainly the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Owner Operator (AECOO), and land administration, which covers the cadastral registration, spatial or zoning plans, as well as property valuation. Noteworthy to mention at this point is, that today the subdivision plans regarding apartment rights in buildings are to be provided on the floor plans as submitted with the building/construction permit request. These plans show the apartment boundaries as twodimensional (2D) representations, which are insufficient to clearly and completely describe the ownership rights in multi-storey buildings. What is more, the building parts obtained from 2D representations are also inadequate to estimate the valuation of these apartments in both taxation and selling/buying processes. Considering that digitalization and consequently digital data are becoming more and more the norm in the AECOO industry, including the building permit requests, there is an opportunity to exploit Building Information Model (BIM), specifically Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), in the registration of apartment rights in three-dimensional (3D) representations. To investigate the opportunity, this study will further analyze the cases of the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey by revealing the similarities and discrepancies with respect to the registration of apartment rights in terms of legislative basis and current practice and extrapolating the current 2D practices into fully 3D representations. In earlier work, ISO19152 LADM-based models for the 3D building legal spaces have been developed and are related to BIM/IFC. The main objective of the study is to highlight the possibility of providing an internationally standardized modeling specification for 3D registration of legal rights within buildings, based on the earlier detected information model overlaps. What is more, it is expected to increase the awareness in other sectors than land administration with regards to legal spaces in the buildings. Finally, this study endeavors to provide concrete guidelines for the other sectors, most specifically the Architects, regarding the type of information that BIM/IFC models should have, in order to facilitate the 3D registration of apartment rights.