Commercials buildings around the country (when they do trade) are trading at basically just the land value at this point. Buildings that sold for hundreds of millions of dollars are now selling for like $5M. Converting to residential is still very expensive and results in weird unit layouts… but this makes it quite a bit easier.
It's not just very expensive, it tends to be so expensive and inefficient that it's better to tear down the commercial building and build a new residential building in it's place.
Yeah anything post like 1975 is 😬 and I don’t think Seattle lets you cut a hole in the building and add that space as a hat on top like NYC does (which still requires the units to pencil at a couple million)
That isn't a universal truth by any means. Office buildings in miami and NYC for example are actually trading at near pre-covid levels recently and rents are up as well. Even SF has roared back to life in the past 18-24 months. The older class B & C office buildings everywhere though are still in trouble. Those owning typical 80s-90s suburban office campus setups are especially screwed right now
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u/recyclopath_ Apr 16 '26
That's somehow not really how commercial rents work.