Developing a model for Malaysia's office classification

The ability to classify or grade offices accurately is important for the reliable assessment of the quality of office stock in any property market. Research has been ongoing to find an office classification framework of sufficient calibre to be adopted as the national standard in Malaysia. In developing the proposed model, the first challenge is to determine what criteria are relevant to the model. The selected criteria must both recognize the practices in other countries and embrace local values and preferences. The expert focus group method is used to identify locally relevant criteria and, together with the analytical hierarchy process technique, to determine weights for the criteria. The results show a striking similarity between the set of criteria chosen in this exercise and that prepared from a review of international as well as of earlier local practices. A classification model was then developed using the identified criteria and a further expert focus group to determine appropriate decision rules as well as of the classification parameters and measures. Model validation shows that the resultant model performs reasonably well against practitioners' assessment.