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White House opens $45 billion in federal funds to developers to convert offices to homes
(www.marketwatch.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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It's totally possible to refit office high rises for residential use. But it is a major refit (though much cheaper than rebuilding the house) and you will get rather bad flats in the end.
Double floors, double ceilings and easy-to-move plasterboard walls are great for offices, since they can change up the layout of the office extremely fast.
But in residential buildings this translates to walls that are too weak to hang stuff on them and bad sound proofing.
Not impossible to live there, but considerably worse than a high rise that was built for residential use.
This in turn doesn't make perfect financial sense, since the owner of such a building is now not renting out expensive office spaces in good locations, but instead low-standard cheap flats.
It can be done, but it's not something an office building owner would want to do without additional financial incentives, and then only if there is no chance that they can rent out the space as offices.
It's even possible to do without those incentives. Or at least it was before interest rates spiked.
I know of 2 buildings in my city that were converted in the 2016-2019 timeframe.
Both had to have the interiors gutted and new interior walls built, new plumbing on the floors added, new curtain wall glass, upgraded elevators, new HVAC and upgraded electrical.
It was a multi-year project (so no revenue and plenty of expense for a couple of years), but both have full residential occupancy now, where in the several previous years they were around 50% office occupancy.
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That said, given current borrowing costs, going without revenue for a couple of years during construction is not going to appeal to many owners unless there is some other incentives.
Just like with high rise construction, you start at the bottom and get those occupied while you work your way up.
A very specific set of stars need to align for this to be in the owner's financial interest without additional financial incentives, but it does occur sometimes.