On the evening of June 14th 2014 American time, Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International held The Outstanding Building of the Year (TOBY) award ceremony in Orlando, America. More than 2000 elites in the field of commercial estate operation and management witnessed Beijing Jiaming Center’s nomination of TOBY Award, the highest honor in the industry. Thus Jiaming becomes the first office building in China and even Asia to be honored with the TOBY nomination.
This was also the first time a Chinese or even Asian office building is nominated for the TOBY Award since its conception around 30 years ago. Among hundreds of office buildings that competed for the award, 8 projects (with building areas between 50,000 to 100,000 square meters) received the nomination. They are:
(NAME: Jiaming Center; LOCATION:Beijing OWNER:Jiaming Investment Group PROPERTY COMPANY: Jiaming Savills TIME OF INAUGURATION: 2010)
The nomination of Jiaming Center not only represented the honor of the owners and operations and management team of Jiaming Center, but also that of all Chinese counterparts in the field of commercial real estate operations and management. It also enabled international professionals to be aware of the outstanding operations and management capabilities of the Chinese commercial real estate.
BOMA International TOBY Awards is also known as the “Oscar” awards of international commercial real estate operation and management industry. Every year, more than 100 well-known office buildings from different countries would participate in competing for this award. World renowned buildings like the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, John Hancock Building, Chrysler Building, Bank of America Tower, Aon Center and Time Warner Center all won the TOBY award only once respectively. The TOBY Awards would be announced annually at the end of June at the BOMA International meeting, where more than 5000 professionals in the commercial real estate operations and management field around the world gather.
After receiving the Certificate of Excellence (COE) of BOMA China, the team at Jiaming Center was determined to compete for the TOBY Awards presented by BOMA International and succeeded in receiving the TOBY Award annual nomination for 2013-2014. One of the requirements for the qualification of the award competition is that the project must first acquire COE.
How did Jiaming Center get COE from BOMA China? As early as October, 2012, the operation and management team of Jiaming Center began to improve its management-related operation and management files and management procedure with the reference to the Guide to Developing a Standard Operation Procedure manual (click to download PDF version). Under the guidance of the manual and the assistance of BOMA China, the operation and management team of Jiaming Center has improved operation and management ability by means of preparing for and passing the evaluation as well as improving operation management system. On October 20th, 2013, two of BOMA International’s senior experts of commercial real estate operation and management with 30-year experience undertook field evaluation, believing that Jiaming Center’s operation and management standard matched with the international standard. Thus BOMA China finally granted Jiaming Center COE.
On the evening of June 24th 2014, the 25-people delegation of BOMA China with over 2000 other colleagues from the field witnessed the TOBY Award Ceremony and Jiaming Center’s winning of the first nomination of TOBY award in China.
