COBie (Construction Operations Building information exchange) is a structured way of handing over asset data — spaces, the products installed, their types, manufacturers, warranties and maintenance information — to the people who will operate a building. It is usually delivered as a spreadsheet, and it is a subset of what an IFC model can carry.

Can COBie be generated from an IFC file?

Yes. Facilities, floors, spaces, zones, types and components map directly from IFC entities and their property sets. The quality of the COBie depends entirely on whether the model carries that information — an export cannot invent a manufacturer or a serial number that was never modelled.

Which COBie sheets matter most to facilities management?

Component (the maintainable assets), Space (the room programme) and Type (the product types components resolve to). A COBie file with complete Component, Space and Type sheets is usable; one with perfect Contact and Document sheets but empty Components is not.

Is a COBie completeness score the same as COBie compliance?

No. A completeness score measures how much of the data an FM team relies on is present and identifiable. Formal compliance checks against a specific COBie specification and the project's own requirements. Treat completeness as an early warning, not a certificate.

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Delivery & ISO 19650 · 2026-10-01 · 10 min

COBie From IFC: What Your FM Team Actually Needs (and How to Check It Before Handover)

COBie is where good BIM goes to die: a spreadsheet produced in the last week of the project, full of blank cells, that the facilities team never opens. Extracting it from the IFC early — and measuring how complete it is — changes that.

COBie From IFC: What Your FM Team Actually Needs (and How to Check It Before Handover) — IFC Viewer Online article cover

Ask a facilities manager what they did with the COBie from their last new building and the most common answer is a pause. The spreadsheet exists. It was delivered, it satisfied the contract, it has eighteen tabs. And the Component sheet — the one listing the things that need maintaining — is half empty, because nobody looked at it until the week of handover.

The fix is not a better COBie tool at the end. It is extracting COBie from the IFC early and often, and measuring what is missing while there is still time to model it.

COBie is a view of the IFC, not a separate deliverable

Diagram mapping COBie sheets to IFC entities: Facility, Floor, Space, Zone, Type, Component and System, with Space, Type and Component marked as FM core — Each COBie sheet is a view of IFC entities. Component, Space and Type carry most of what facilities management uses.

Every row that matters in COBie corresponds to something in the IFC. A Floor is an IfcBuildingStorey. A Space is an IfcSpace. A Type is an element type such as IfcDoorType. A Component is an element occurrence — a specific door, a specific pump. The attributes COBie asks for live in the IFC's attributes and property sets.

COBie sheet	Comes from	What FM uses it for
Facility	IfcProject, IfcSite, IfcBuilding	Which building this is
Floor	IfcBuildingStorey	Navigating the asset register
Space	IfcSpace (name, long name, area)	Room programme, cleaning, space management
Zone	IfcZone and space groupings	Fire, HVAC and security zones
Type	Element types and their psets	Product data, warranty, spares
Component	Element occurrences	The maintainable assets — the reason COBie exists
System	IfcSystem and its assignments	Which components form a system

The consequence is uncomfortable and useful: if the COBie is poor, the model is poor. Fixing the spreadsheet by hand in the final week produces a document that disagrees with the model it was supposedly derived from — and the next handover repeats the exercise.

Why most COBie deliverables are empty

Spaces were never modelled, or were modelled without names. No spaces, no Space sheet, and every Component loses its location.
Components have no stable identifier. If GlobalIds change between exports, the asset register cannot be updated from a later model; it has to be rebuilt.
Types are missing or generic. Two hundred doors pointing at one type called "Door" is technically a Type sheet and practically useless.
Manufacturer, model and warranty data arrive after the model is frozen, and are typed into the spreadsheet instead of the model.

The second point is the one that quietly destroys the value of the whole exercise. Why IFC GUIDs change on every export explains the cause and the fix for each authoring tool.

Measuring completeness before handover

You do not need a COBie specialist to know whether a model is on track. Three questions, asked at every stage from design freeze onwards, catch almost everything:

Components: what fraction have both a name and a GlobalId? An asset needs a human label and a stable ID to be handed over.
Spaces: what fraction are named? An unnamed space cannot be found by anybody operating the building.
Types: do the components resolve to types at all?

Our COBie extraction answers exactly those three and combines them into an FM-readiness indicator — Components weighted most heavily, then Spaces, then Types — with the per-sheet breakdown alongside. It is deliberately a completeness measure, not a compliance certificate: it tells you whether the data an FM team depends on is there, and says so in those words.

Writing COBie requirements the model can meet

COBie requirements belong in the EIR and, ideally, in an IDS file the supplier can run themselves. "Every IfcSpace has a Name and a LongName", "every IfcDoorType carries Manufacturer and ModelReference" — each is a single IDS specification, and each is checkable on every revision long before anyone opens a spreadsheet.

How to write those specifications is covered in IDS explained. Where COBie sits among the other handover artefacts is in what to hand over with an IFC model.

COBie is not produced at handover. It is revealed at handover — and by then it is too late to change what it reveals.

COBie From IFC: What Your FM Team Actually Needs (and How to Check It Before Handover)