“I’ve Never Seen It Done So Lazily”: Horrid Converted Office Apartment Costing $520,000 Goes Viral

In an attempt to solve the housing crisis, some developers decided to take work from home in an entirely new direction. Seeing all the empty, abandoned offices out there, someone had the genius idea to just convert them into apartments. On the surffice, not a terrible idea.

But as one TikToker shared, a few developers decided to do the absolute bare minimum when turning an office into a living space. So if you ever wanted to see what it might look like to live in your break room, scroll down and enjoy some haunting Zillow images and viewers' indignant reactions to these listings.
More info: TikTok

It’s no secret that accommodations and the housing market, in general, are not in the greatest place right now. Demand is high, supply remains low and prices look like someone accidentally added an extra zero or two to the end of the number. The factors behind this are myriad, but one that has been going on since 2020 is the ever-increasing popularity of working from home. Employees who are no longer tied down to specific neighborhoods, cities, or even countries tend to shop far and wide for a house to buy or rent. At the same time, offices across the US remain pretty empty, with some studies estimating that up to 50% of office buildings are simply sitting unused at the moment.

The flip side of this is demand for housing has now exploded across the world, as listings won’t just be looked at by locals, but by remote workers, potential Airbnb hosts, and real estate companies seeking to cash in on the heightened demand. So some theorists and developers looked at all the offices sitting empty and wondered if this was the golden ticket to solve both issues at once. The reality is that offices generally were never built as living spaces and tend to require extensive modifications to be converted into homes. Of course, that’s assuming that the developers want to make nice, comfortable living spaces and not a gray-carpeted nightmare, as shown in the TikTok above.

Most offices are large, open designs, with climate controls set up around efficiency, as it would be quite expensive to run separate heating and cooling for each cubicle. Unless tenants can figure out a way to find a consensus with multiple neighbors on how high or low to leave the thermostat, office-to-apartment conversions need new cooling, heating, and insolation systems built from the ground up. Most US offices don’t have operable windows according to one estimate and larger building conversions risk having cell-like apartments in the core of the structure with no window access at all. While people might have lowered their standards to try and find a place to live, the comments under this TikTok show that there are still some lines people won’t cross when it comes to accommodation.

But even if developers are willing to go through all the necessary steps to turn an unused office into an acceptable apartment and also not drive up the price too much, there is still a bottleneck that needs to be kept in mind. There are just not enough offices to really solve the massive demand for housing. In the US, offices take up a lot less space than residential buildings and other businesses in most major cities. For example, Denver needs between 13,148 and 30,930 more housing units to keep up with demand. Even if every compatible and empty office building in Denver were to be converted, this would yield only about 1500 apartments, at 1,000 square feet each. In other words, office-to-apartment conversions, at best, would cover about 10% of the city's needs.

Other studies, this time in the metropolitan city of San Francisco have estimated that only 3% of the city's demand could be met by converting offices. By 2030, they have estimated that San Francisco needs over 80 '000 new housing units, while office conversions could really only provide around 2700 units. This is not to say that these initiatives are bad, as most things in life aren't solved by one fix. But as Zillowtastrophes very accurately identifies here, more often than not, realtors and developers will just use this as an excuse to flip lazy conversions to desperate people. So unless you have always dreamed of living at your desk, best to stay away.