If landlords can’t pay back loans on office buildings, the lenders will suffer. Some banks are trying to avoid that fate.
Hard times are likely ahead for a lot of people. Mind your expenses and plan to save where possible just in case. Apologies for having a doomer outlook; I’m very cynical about capitalism, especially in the USA.
Remodel as residential?
It really just isn’t possible for most ooffice buildings. Think about how many bathrooms/kitchenettes are on a floor of any office building. You would have to likely double or triple that number to convert to housing, which is an absolutely insane and expensive prospect that would require gutting the entire building and resoing the entire plumbing and electric systems. It’s chraper to jist tear the fuckers down and build something made for condos/apartments.
Not sure why creating very affordable housing for extremely low income/homeless, that share a communal bathroom/kitchen on each floor would be such a hard sell? Hostel mentality? Feels like there’s still room for at least one in every major city.
Not a solution for all commercial real estate obviously.
It’s the plumbing, mainly. Not designed to carry that much throughput.
What if you have one resident per floor?
I know that’s it’s not efficient, but investors would just have to swallow those costs given their bad investment decision.
They called them “apodments” there for a bit, but “dormitory” is probably a more accurate term. Small 300sqft rooms, sometimes with a small kitchenette but generally shared kitchen/baths on each floor.
The gimmick is that they were “cheaper” than full apartments for people that just need to sleep somewhere and then leave, but I think they fell out of vogue with luxury apartments taking over instead.
On the plus side for conversions, old 70s era and early office building apprently convert pretty well to residential before they are a ways overbuilt for office space compared to more modern buildings. Likely thousands of possible units in most cities.
No one wants to take the upfront cost of renovation. Corporate buildings aren’t an easy conversion into normal apartments. Plumbing especially is very different.
I’ve seen estimates that it’s frequently cheaper to demolish the building and build a new one.
That may be true depending on the extent of remodeling necessary. Do that and make it a green building with modern heat pump and you could make a profit in a few years. But they want the profit now