Gensler Principal and Studio Director Steven Paynter sat down recently with financial news service Marketplace.org to detail his firm’s year-old proprietary office conversion metric, a unique tool that has become indispensable as the industry looks to position itself for the mass-scale nationwide surge in the conversion market expected for the coming decade.

Paynter had previously revealed the metric’s surprising findings that only about 30% of commercial buildings have the ideal structural prerequisites (e.g., window depth, floor plates, and ceiling heights), essentially doubling down on his original claims with added details as to the so-called “Goldilocks” zones architects look for when looking at structures for a residential conversion. 

“[If] you took a typical floor plate, for example, in those the average unit size for your location or your city, it would divide that unit size by the quarter window depth, so very quickly say, OK, your unit ends up being 25 feet wide and 30 feet deep, really nice,” he says. “You can get the bedroom and the living room [...] on the glass, or it will say, Oh, it’s 60 feet deep and 10 feet wide. That’s horrible. Let’s not go ahead. So starts to look at all of those data points and say, Is this good? Is it bad because it’s either not viable, like people won’t want to live there? Or it’s not viable from a cost point of view? And it just then aggregates all of that to give you an overall sense of yes or no.”

The findings were later echoed by a Moody’s Analytics report, which said that most, if not all, buildings constructed prior to 1980 were not suitable for conversion. Nevertheless, seminal projects such as the renovation of Philadelphia's One Franklin Tower (which Paynter also details) have been made possible thanks in large part to the metric. Conversions will play a vital part in not just the creation of housing but also in stimulating scarcity in the CRE market, which in turn will bolster many cities' sagging economies as they face the consequences of post-pandemic downturns. 

Paynter says the metric has been used on over 800 buildings, yielding scores that help not only to determine the efficacy of present-day projects but are also valuable as a data source which later can be mined and further analyzed in support of future endeavors from developers and planning officials. 

Paynter also spoke to the need for refinements to be made in the algorithm that governs site value and the placement of a structure within its neighborhood context for developers. The full, 11-minute interview can be found here.