138
Downtown Toronto faces a crush of rising office vacancies that could threaten building valuations
(www.theglobeandmail.com)
this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
138 points (96.6% liked)
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I've actually heard it's incredibly difficult to retrofit office space into condos/apartments.
*to profitably retrofit.
Office buildings have too much "inside space". Regulations, and human life, requires windows for residential living areas, so this inside space is "wasted" in office to apartment refits. There are tons of great ideas on what to do with this space in terms of community space, but very few profitable ones. Once commercial rents crashe and these buildings lose most of their values you'll be surprised what becomes profitable again lol.
It seems like the obvious answer is to put facilities and businesses in the same buildings instead of nearby. Medical, convenience/light grocery, school rooms, some community centers, civil services, storage, remote work spaces, etc.
I definitely think this is a great answer, with the only caveat being that working in a space that doesn't have windows all day is pretty lame. I'd like to see what that would look like.
I believe the hurdle for that might be regulatory. For good reason in my opinion because mixing residential and commercial/retail on the same indoor floor has a lot of unique considerations that I'm not sure have been looked at. Letting real estate hedge funds decide based on profit only will be a nightmare lol
Plumbing, apparently, is one issue—residential buildings typically need much more of it than office buildings do. Not an insurmountable problem, but costs $$ to overcome.
The 2 projects I witnessed had to re-do the plumbing, electrical, elevators, fire detection/sprinklers, HVAC, and exterior glass, in addition to gutting every interior wall and doing a full asbestos removal.
It was a lot of work, over several years, but they now have full residential occupancy, so it seems to have worked out.
It is. Difficult, time consuming and expensive.
But even with that, I've seen a couple happen that seem to have been sucessful.
It took them almost 3 years between commercial tenants leaving and residential tenants moving in, but it from what I can tell, it appears to have been sucessful.
I actually used to live in a loft that was a former sears warehouse, it was pretty cool. Had lots of character.