Soft story buildings often severely damage and collapse in earthquakes. Developing appropriate seismic capability evaluation approaches is helpful to facilitate the retrofit construction for the buildings without sufficient seismic capability. Base on the preliminary seismic capability evaluation approach proposed by National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), the authors enhance the reduction factors which are related to soft stories to improve the current practice. In addition, the authors also automate the preliminary evaluation process by Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology. Information are extracted automatically from BIM models and then served as the input parameters for preliminary evaluations. The results show that the proposed BIM-based approach can not only accelerate the evaluation process but also provide an integrated information platform for building maintenance.