How a home record maps to COBie, IFC and the building logbooks

A house record holds nine parts: the house, its floors, its rooms, the things in them, its systems, its papers, its service history, the people who serve it, and where each fact came from. Builders’ formats and three governments already name most of them, each in its own words.

The five

COBie is the handover workbook in the US National BIM Standard. Building owners ask for it in their contracts; no law requires it (NBIMS-US V3, COBie).

IFC 4.3 is buildingSMART’s open model of a building, published as ISO 16739-1 (IFC 4.3 schema source).

The EU digital building logbook is defined in the EU’s 2024 directive on the energy performance of buildings. The Commission’s 2025 business case says logbooks “function primarily as a voluntary repository for building energy performance data” (European Commission). Its fields come from the Commission’s 2020 study (Report 1, Table 3).

France’s carnet d’information du logement has been law since January 1, 2023, for work that changes a home’s energy performance. It is “établi et mis à jour par le propriétaire du logement”: drawn up and kept by the home’s owner (Code de la construction et de l’habitation, L126-35-5).

The UK property logbook is not law yet. The government plans to require logbooks “when parliamentary time allows”, and says “there is nothing to stop industry from providing these products now” (GOV.UK). The UK column is read from the Property Data Trust Framework, the property pack schema for England and Wales (PDTF). The Residential Logbook Association has not published its own specification, so it is not in the table.

How the parts map

What none of them records

None of the five marks each fact as measured or estimated. The nearest:

• IFC keeps who changed each object and when (IfcOwnerHistory). COBie kept who entered each row and when, until version 3 dropped it (change log, 7.02).
• IFC names a method of measurement, for quantities, not for facts.
• France asks whether each plan shows the design or the work as built (L126-35-6).
• The UK framework records the evidence for a claim: a document, an electronic record, or a person who vouches for it (PDTF verified claims).

That mark is what a home digital twin asks of every part.