Glossary

Elevator Banking

Also known as: elevator zoning, low-rise/high-rise banking

The practice of dividing a high-rise building's elevator cars into separate banks that each serve a distinct range of floors (typically low-rise, mid-rise, and high-rise), rather than running every car to every floor.

Elevator banking is a core determinant of vertical transportation efficiency and, in practice, of a floor's perceived desirability: high-rise-bank floors typically command a view premium but also depend on a single bank of cars, so an elevator modernization or outage affecting that bank disproportionately impacts fewer, higher-paying tenants, while low-rise floors benefit from shorter wait times but lower ceiling heights and views. Banking configuration is a fixed capital decision made at design (or major modernization) and cannot be easily altered afterward, which is why it is scrutinized in due diligence on older towers being repositioned for higher-density users, since inadequate elevatoring relative to a proposed tenant's headcount density can cap the building's effective leasable capacity regardless of available floor space.