Conversion Meter: A new tool to assess the conversion potential of vacant office buildings into housing

Building owners and other stakeholders can adopt different strategies to cope with vacancy, such as consolidation, rent reduction, selling the building, renovation, transfor-mation and conversion to adapted reuse, or demolish and build a new building. This paper dis-cusses a new developed tool to cope with vacancy by adaptive reuse. It presents...

A second chance for old buildings

In the Netherlands, both the office market and housing market show a mismatch between supply and demand, quantitatively and qualitatively. In 2007 almost 14% of all offices are vacant, i.e. 5.9 million square meters. At the same time we see a shortage of about 1 million dwellings. A building must be able to be changed over its life cycle to...

Good buildings drive out bad buildings

In the study 'Offices for Living in', published in CIB W104 Open Building Implementation, Mexico 2002, an instrument was developed for measuring the potential of transforming (soon-to-be) empty office premises into homes. As a follow-up, this survey 'Good Buildings Drive out Bad Buildings' looks explicitly at the lower end of the office premises...