U.S. Office-to-Resi Conversions Hit 71K New Units, With NYC Leading the Pack
By Isabelle Durso February 6, 2025 4:17 pm
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Office-to-residential conversion projects in the U.S. have spiked in 2025, with 70,700 new housing units in the pipeline, according to a report from RentCafe.
That number — a 28 percent jump from 2024 — comprises roughly 51,700 units carried over from last year’s pipeline plus roughly 19,000 new conversions added to the mix, the report found.
New York City is leading the push with 8,310 units, a large chunk of which will come thanks to Metro Loft Management and David Werner Real Estate Investments’ planned conversion of the former Pfizer headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street.
That project, which is expected to create 536 rental units alone, will be combined with the developers’ conversion of the adjacent building at 219 East 42nd Street for a total of 1,600 units, as Commercial Observer previously reported.
Other major conversion projects in the city include Apollo Global Management, SL Green Realty and RXR’s transformation of 5 Times Square into 942 apartments, as well as Fieldstone Capital’s partial conversion of 2 Wall Street into 121 units.
New York City was followed by Washington, D.C., in office-to-residential conversions, with the nation’s capital planning 6,533 units. Los Angeles finished third with 4,388 units, RentCafe’s report found.
Projects in D.C. and L.A. include the conversion of D.C.’s Universal Buildings into a 525-unit residential complex called The Geneva and the redevelopment of L.A.’s 33-story ARCO Tower into apartments, according to the report.
Nearly 15 percent of all office buildings in the U.S. are suitable for conversion, with modern buildings constructed between the 1990s and 2010s accounting for 1.27 percent of completed conversions, the report found.
The share of younger office buildings being converted into residential is expected to grow significantly over the next few years to 7 percent, RentCafe said.
In addition, office-to-residential conversions now account for almost 42 percent of the nearly 169,000 apartments considered “future adaptive reuse projects,” according to the report.
Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.
