Office Conversions Find New Life After Property Values Plunge
Office-to-residential conversions are gaining traction, helping revitalize depressed business districts
4 min
Developer efforts to convert emptying office towers into residential buildings have largely gone nowhere. That may be finally changing.
The prospect of transforming unused office space into much-needed housing seemed a logical way to resolve both issues. But few conversions moved forward because the cost of acquiring even an aging office building remained too high for the economics to pencil out.
Now that office vacancy has reached record levels, sellers are willing to take what they can. That has caused values to plunge for nothing-special buildings in second-rate locations, making the numbers on many of those properties now viable for conversions.
Seventy-three U.S. conversion projects have been completed this year, slightly up from 63 in 2023, according to real-estate services firm CBRE Group. But another 309 projects are planned or under way with about three-quarters of them office to residential. In all, about 38,000 units are in the works, CBRE said.
“The pipeline keeps replenishing itself,” said Julie Whelan , CBRE’s senior vice president of research.
In the first six months of this year, half of the $1.12 billion in Manhattan office-building purchases were by developers planning conversion projects, according to Ariel Property Advisors.
While New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are leading the way, conversions also are popping up in Cincinnati, Phoenix, Houston and Dallas. A venture of General Motors and Bedrock announced Monday a sweeping redevelopment of Detroit’s famed Renaissance Center that includes converting one of its office buildings into apartments and a hotel.
In Cleveland, 12% of its total office inventory is either undergoing conversions or is planned for conversion. Many projects there are clustered around the city’s 10-acre Public Square. The former transit hub went through a $50 million upgrade about 10 years ago, adding fountains, an amphitheater and green paths.
“You end up with so much space that you paid so little for, that you can create amenities that you would never build if you were doing new construction,” said Daniel Neidich, chief executive of Dune Real Estate Partners, a private-equity firm that has teamed up with developer TF Cornerstone to invest $1 billion on about 20 conversion projects throughout the U.S. in the next three years.
Conversions won’t solve the office crisis, or make much of a dent in the U.S. housing shortage . And many obsolete office buildings don’t work as conversion projects because their floors are too big or due to other design issues. The 71 million square feet of conversions that are planned or under way only account for 1.7% of U.S. office inventory, CBRE said.
But city planners believe that conversions will play an important part in revitalising depressed business districts, which have been hollowed out by weak return-to-office rates in many places.
And developers are starting to find ways around longstanding obstacles in larger buildings. A venture led by GFP Real Estate is installing two light wells in a Manhattan office-conversion project at 25 Water St. to ensure that all the apartments will get sufficient light and air.
Cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Calgary, Alberta, have started to roll out new subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives to boost conversions.
The projects are breathing new life into iconic properties that no longer work as office buildings. The Flatiron Building in New York will be redeveloped into condominiums. In Cincinnati, the owner of the Union Central Life Insurance Building is converting it into more than 280 units of housing with a rooftop pool, health club and commercial space.
In the first couple of years of the pandemic, office building owners were able to hold on to their properties because of government assistance and because tenants continued to pay rent under long-term leases.
As leases matured and demand remained anaemic, landlords began to capitulate and dump buildings at enormous discounts to peak values. In Washington, D.C., for example, Post Brothers last year paid about $66 million for 2100 M Street, which had sold for as much as $150 million in 2007.
Washington, D.C., has been particularly hard hit by the office downturn because the federal government has been especially permissive in allowing employees to work from home .
“We’re able to make it work as a conversion because it was no longer priced as though it could be repositioned as office,” said Matt Pestronk , Post’s president and co-founder.
Increasingly, more deals are taking place behind the scenes as converters reach deals with creditors to buy debt on troubled office buildings and then push out the owners. GFP Real Estate reduced costs of its $240 million conversion of 25 Water Street by buying the debt at a discount and cutting deals with tenants to exit the building before their leases matured.
One of the first projects planned by the venture of Dune and TF Cornerstone likely will be the Wanamaker Building in Philadelphia. TF Cornerstone just purchased the debt on the office space in the building and is in the process of taking title.
“The banks are foreclosing and doing short sales,” said Neidich, Dune’s CEO. “There’s a ton of it going on.”
In Washington, D.C., a conversion of the old Peace Corps headquarters building near Dupont Circle is 70% leased just four months after opening, said developer Gary Cohen . Rents are higher than expected.
“If that’s the way to get people downtown, that’s what we have to do,” Cohen said.
Not all developers agree that the economics of conversions work, even at today’s low prices. Miki Naftali , who has converted more than five New York properties over the years, said he has been very actively looking at conversion candidates but hasn’t yet found a deal that works financially.
One of the issues facing converters is that even if an office building is dying, it often has a few existing tenants who would need to be relocated. Some buildings would need atriums to ensure that all the apartments have sufficient light and air.
“When you start to add everything up, if your costs get close to new construction, that’s when you get to the point that it doesn’t make financial sense,” Naftali said.
Some landlords are including clauses in leases that give them the right to evict tenants to make room for a major conversion. Others are keeping a small ownership stake when they sell buildings so that they can learn the conversion process for future buildings.
“The world is looking at these assets in a different way,” said developer William Rudin , whose company decided to learn the conversion process by keeping a stake in 55 Broad Street, a downtown New York office building it sold last year to a converter.
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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