What It Really Takes to Convert an Office Building Into Apartments
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of talk lately about "office-to-resi" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects.
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| 0:32.8 | Is it about what you have in the bank or your 401k? Should you buy a place where you live or |
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| 0:59.5 | wealth. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adlots podcast. I'm Joe Wyzenthal. |
| 1:15.3 | And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, I think everyone sort of knows that in many cities, but definitely |
| 1:20.3 | in New York City, there's sort of this weird, like, there's two simultaneous real estate problems, |
| 1:26.5 | and they sort of complement each other in a weird way. Right. Okay. So rents are too high. There's |
| 1:30.8 | a shortage of housing and we have a bunch of empty office buildings and there's a sort of obvious |
| 1:36.4 | solution, which would be take all the empty office buildings and convert them into preferably |
| 1:41.0 | affordable housing. And yet it seems to be very difficult. That sounds super easy. Just like, |
| 1:46.7 | oh, we're going to turn these offices into homes now. Just like live in like an open plan |
| 1:51.2 | trading floor. Yeah. Sounds nice. Sounds all right. You know, put up some walls to people |
| 1:55.4 | of some privacy. Okay. But on it, actually, this reminds me, when I was at university, I had a friend |
| 1:59.6 | who lived in a warehouse in London and they built their walls out of cardboard to segment it. |
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