What You Will Learn in This Video on The Effect of Repurposing on the Westchester Office Market:
- The amount of office inventory in Westchester County, New York, has decreased from 33 million square feet to 26 million square feet over the past 15 years.
- This is due to the conversion of obsolete office buildings in Westchester into other uses, such as medical facilities, fitness centers, and residential properties.
- This trend is helping to reduce the vacancy rate in the Westchester office market, as there is less supply to meet the existing demand.
Video Transcript:
“How does the repurposing that’s been going on in Westchester affect the office market? For example, Ginsburg in White Plains has converted what was a showcase office complex into now some residential.
That’s a great question and it’s a significant impact in the market. Maybe 15 years ago, the multi-tenant market in Westchester, the amount of inventory was considered to be about 33 million square feet. Now we’re down to 26 million, and it is still shrinking. And the reason that that has happened is that obsolete office buildings have either been changed into medical properties or similar, or the buildings have literally just been demolished. There were six office buildings demolished to build the Wegmans supermarket on Corporate Park Drive and the apartments that were there.
And what is this doing again? It’s taking obsolete product that was built in the mid-1980s. It’s taking it off the market. Landlords can’t rent it anyway. They can’t afford to put the capital expense in that’s needed to keep the buildings up, to keep the systems up, so on and so forth. And tenants don’t want to be in these buildings anyway.
So between new medical uses, Lifetime Fitness was built on an old office site, other things that have been done, buildings have just been scraped and multi-family residential is going up on their sites. All of this is helping to shrink the office market and in effect modifying or softening the lack of demand. Because if we had the same amount of demand that we have now in a 33 million square foot market, we would have a much higher vacancy rate than we do with that same demand than a 26 million square foot office market.”
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