Residential

With the right reuse strategies and tools, transforming under-performing office buildings and retail centers into housing can be a key opportunity.

Many of today’s developers are capitalizing on the growing number of vacant office buildings, converting them to residential communities, increasing savings in embodied carbon and construction costs. Utilizing stranded assets, existing infrastructure, and innovative ways of building will give developers a growing range of project delivery options and development price points.

Understanding new policies aimed at making housing more attainable to more people will give developers leverage in the residential market.

Making housing more affordable with new funds and regulations is becoming a top agenda item for world governments, including the European Union and the U.S. government (in early 2022, the Biden administration announced the Housing Supply Action Plan). Understanding the details of these new policies will give affordable housing developers a leg up.

Trends in “flexible housing” — modular buildings and kit-of-parts floor plans — will allow developers to evolve as market needs and expectations shift.

The concept of building flexibility is increasingly applied to residential housing design because of shifting demands from residents and the need for residential developers to react as the market evolves. This translates to everything from floorplans that can easily change to parking garage structures that can be converted to residential units.