Office-to-apartment conversions. The pipeline is 90,300 units, ten metros hold more than half of it, and most buildings still do not pencil without help.

New York and Washington hold 24,837 of the 90,300 units. Ten metros hold more than half.

A national rent-data series counts 90,300 office-to-apartment units in the conversion pipeline at the start of 2026, 28 % more than a year earlier. Offices are 47 % of all planned adaptive-reuse projects; hotels are 18 % and industrial buildings 16 %. The metro counts below are office-to-apartment units.

New York leads with 16,358 units. Washington, D.C. follows with 8,479, then Chicago 4,360, Los Angeles 4,340 and Dallas 3,966. The ten metros listed add up to 49,374 units, 54.7 % of the national figure. The report names ten metros, so we cannot rank an eleventh.

The report does not split the pipeline by stage; it is a count of projects filed, not of apartments delivered. We found no completions figure for 2025 in the sources we read, so the page does not give one.

Read the ranking as where developers are filing, not where conversions finish. We did not test whether a program explains the lead. The city fiscal review of the 467-m exemption is in Part 2. How we counted

A policy-research study found no viable conversion in five of six markets without a policy change. New York’s exemption roughly doubles the residual land value.

The study tested three office buildings in each of six downtowns. Under average residential rents, 95 % occupancy and no incentives, 16 of the 18 buildings had a negative net present value after conversion costs. In five of the six markets, none of the conversions was economically viable without a policy change. Average hard cost was above $300 per square foot in every city except Houston, и the lowest recent conversion cost the authors found was $145 per square foot.

The city fiscal review assumes $500 per gross square foot, excluding the site but including financing. Under that assumption a market-rate conversion leaves a residual land value of $122 per gross square foot without 467-m and $250 with it, on a yield-on-cost basis. The pipeline the review studied has 44 buildings and 17,432 units, и 27 of the buildings, 15,414 units, are potentially eligible for the exemption.

A lender-data analysis, next to a benchmark of about $600 per square foot to buy a finished apartment building, puts the cost of buying and converting an office at $685 per square foot, against about $588 for ground-up development. These are national averages from the sources quoted, not figures we measured. A bank is quoted at a loss of $164 per square foot on a conversion that does not work at current pricing.

The three studies use different buildings, markets and dates, and we did not rerun any of them. They agree on the direction: a conversion has to buy the building far below replacement cost or have its tax bill reduced. The policy study’s result is under no incentives; the fiscal review’s is New York only.

Cost, the building and the capital stall conversions. The sources do not give a count of stalled projects.

We found no count of cancelled or shelved conversion projects in the sources we read, and the rent-data series says nothing on it, so this page does not give a stalled figure. What the sources do name is the cause. The lender-data analysis quotes a developer saying projects are shelved because “the money is waiting”, and says a missed compliance item can make a marginal project unviable and that damage to post-tension cables during core drilling can cost $25,000 or more to repair.

The policy study’s model compares keeping the building as an office with converting it, so a building that still earns as an office does not convert. The sources we read do not give a floor-plate or building-age test with a measured cutoff, so the page does not give one.

What this page does not replace: a structural engineer’s survey of the floor plate and the cores, a licensed appraisal of the converted value, a zoning and incentive review for the specific site, and a lender’s own reading of the borrower. The figures here are market-wide; a conversion is decided one building at a time.

Что с этим делать

If you develop or lend on conversions: start from the metro’s program, then the building, then the rent. The pipeline counts projects filed; it does not show the screens that failed.

Реалист’s Underwriting reads the deal’s offering memorandum and operating statement, sets the cost and the rent against each other, and returns the issues and the questions for the borrower.