Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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One of the problems with turning skyscrapers into housing is that the typical floor plate of an office tower is not equipped with plumbing (toilet and shower and sink drainage, fresh water suppy) in the concrete slab of each floor. Only in a few spots like "break room" and bathrooms. Same problem in buildings that are 100% steel frame floor slabs and a few inches of concrete on top of the steel.

For instance here's a full floor of the building in question: https://burnettplazaftworth.com/office-space/suite-3000/

There should be a vector based PDF linked there above for closer inspection.

It's very expensive to retrofit residential walls, HVAC, plumbing etc into a building that wasn't designed for it. Not saying it can't be done, some pre-1940 skyscrapers in the lower manhattan/financial district area have been fully converted to 500+ suite rental apartment buildings. But there has to be a relatively high demand in residential leasing demand and $ per sq ft rental rates to make it viable.

I worked in that building years ago a couple floors above the highest step on the west side. My office had an awesome view of the surrounding area. The building has its own attached parking garage easily accessible from two side streets. It's a really attractive building.

I think an owner wouldn't need to refurb the whole building as residential. They could choose to reconfigure the top 5-10 floors as condos and make a killing.

The building has always had strong tenants and reasonably high occupancy. I don't know enough about the office space situation in FtW today but the whole sale for 10% of the previous sale price sounds really suspicious.

This wouldn't be the first mixed residential/retail repurpose in FtW as the old Montgomery Wards headquarters building was completely transformed into mixed condo/retail configuration 15-20 years ago and it is a cornerstone property along 7th street. It was part of the whole transformation of 7th to an entertainment/residential district. Today that area is a big residential-restaurant-nightlife attraction and young professionals moved there for the easy access to downtown and that night life. It gets rowdy out there on weekends.

This Burnett building is farther east by a couple miles or so from there.

There is local experience for conversions like this and FtW is full of old and new money so I wouldn't be surprised to see someone step in and transform it.

I think OPs point is that you could turn each floor into say three units that are 5,000 sq ft each, but sell each unit for only $300K ($100K for the space, $150K for the renovations, and $50K in profit).

There are six toilets and eight sinks on the floor, so you know there is enough plumbing for that may. Each unit could have two toilets, each with a sink, plus a kitchen sink. A big storage area, and the rest up against the windows with the existing HVAC that would be for the whole floor, heating to 68 and cooling to 75.

The point is at those prices, you could build a large home where most of the space is empty, sell it for the price of a small home, and everyone wins.

I think the real market value is not seen in the auction, as pointed out by the other commenters in this thread, the lender would bid up to $83m or $100m or whatever was the outstanding loan amount. There weren't any other legit bidders from 3rd parties who are not the lender bidding $15m or $20m on the building. So if you combine a market value more like $83m to $100m or more with the large amount of labor and materials and time needed to retrofit early-1980s-type office space into condos, the cost per unit could end up being quite a lot.

The sort of real estate developers who renovate bare shell space into condos and lofts are probably going to go do the similar idea with an older warehouse/manufacturing building, as has been seen with some commercial-to-residential conversions in Houston in the past 15 years.

There are also two "break rooms" on each floor near the emergency staircases, I assume those have some plumbing too? However, another interesting challenge will be to make sure that each apartment has access to both the elevators and the staircases...

Hell, if the area is really so cheap, you could even use every other floor for plant and run the plumbing through those levels to the risers. Then anything not used by the plumbing can be storage or other non-living space for the unit above.

You could have a workshop in a skyscraper!

The bigger problem is the renovation requires bring these things up to current code. So it’s probably not too difficult to tie into existing systems, but the code likely necessitates that it all needs to be torn out and rebuilt.

> It's very expensive to retrofit residential walls, HVAC, plumbing etc into a building that wasn't designed for it.

I wonder how much of that can be fudged by having lots and lots of exposed pipework. Using concrete screws and bold primary colors.

The same sort of aesthetic worked for the exterior of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Office blocks all have raised floor tiles that are (from memory as a building site labourer) about 6" above the slab. Could they not be raised to 8" or 9" for wider sewage pipes?

The office buildings I've been in have also had really high ceilings. You could easily lose a foot to provide room for additional plumbing for the floor above.

Yeah, either do that or raise the floor a foot using the raised floor tiles. Just need to watch out for rodents. Mice love the raised floors.

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