RentCafe: Adaptive Reuse at Record Levels
(Image courtesy of Pixabay/pexels.com)
RentCafe, Santa Barbara, Calif., found the number of apartments from converted buildings hit nearly 25,000 in 2024.
That’s up about 50% from 2023 and double the number of apartments delivered via those means in 2022.
While office conversions have been a big conversation in many cities, they accounted for only about 25% of all new units via adaptive reuse last year.
Hotels were the most common category for adaptive reuse projects last year, with 9,100, or 37%, of new rental units. Office-to-apartment conversions accounted for 5,900 units, or 24%. Industrial spaces were 20% of last year’s new units and schools were 8%.
The nearly 2,000 apartments converted from school buildings is a significant increase, climbing from 3% in 2023 to 8% last year. That also makes school conversions the fastest growing segment of adaptive reuse. RentCafe noted that many of the school buildings being renovated this way are historic buildings built in the late 19th to early 20th century that need extensive work.
In 2024, Chicago had the most apartments from adaptive reuse projects, at 880. Next was Denver at 789, Philadelphia at 761, Dallas at 698 and Manhattan at 588.
There are nearly 181,000 apartments in some stage of being converted–many of those are from former office spaces. As of July, roughly 78,500 units are expected to be transformed from former offices, with 35,800 from hotels and about 31,000 from industrial buildings.
