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Office Redevelopments at All-Time High

Caraway is the first project Maiker Housing Partners has adapted and repurposed from a former office building.

According to Rent Café’s latest study on adaptive reuse, apartment conversions are up by 25% from pre-pandemic numbers, with 28,000 new rentals hitting the market nationwide in the last two years. More so, office redevelopments are at an all-time high, creating 11,000 new rentals.

Denver follows the national trend, with conversions more than doubling compared to the two years before the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, developers focused on bringing life back into empty offices and former hotels, adding a combined 255 new apartments in the city.

“The residential market needs significantly more density in the areas of the largest cities, where the demand is greatest and where the tallest office buildings are located,” said Doug Ressler, manager of business intelligence at Yardi Matrix. 

  • Empty offices have been a great source for adaptive reuse projects nationwide — including in Denver, where developers opened 116 new apartments by solely repurposing a former office building that’s currently known as The Caraway.
  • The redevelopment of the Old Quality Inn on Quebec Street made way for 139 new rentals in the city. Old hotels were all the rage in adaptive reuse, especially during the past decade — largely due to their existing floorplans and utilities that were already fit for residential use.
  • Outside of the Mile High City, adaptive reuse projects have been a sure source of housing in Fort Collins and Lakewood, where a combined 110 units were opened in 2020-2021. More so, in the first half of 2022, adaptive reuse projects created 218 new apartments in Lakewood and 210 new rentals in Longmont.
  • Since 1992, adaptive reuse projects made way for 3,409 new rentals in the state of Colorado. A total of 31 buildings were redeveloped, with the Historic Denver Dry being the oldest construction to be repurposed for residential use.

Read the full study HERE

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