How Alexandria Has Become A National Leader In Office-To-Residential Conversions

As cities across the country look to hop aboard the office-to-residential conversion train, Alexandria, Virginia, seems to have cracked the code. 

The Northern Virginia city delivered the second-most office-to-residential conversions in the country last year, with its 435 converted office-to-residential units placing it just behind Los Angeles’ 692, according to RentCafe. 

Maya Contreras, one of Alexandria's principal planners, attributes the success to “a combination of location, a little bit of luck and then good development partners.” 

In June 2022, USAA Real Estate and Lowe completed Park + Ford, the transformation of three 1980s office buildings along the I-95 corridor into 435 units and 115K SF of office. 

“Those were a pair of not particularly eye-catching buildings that I think were really successfully converted,” Contreras told Bisnow.

In the summer of 2022, Brookfield Residential delivered Town Gate North, totaling 81 condo units across two former office buildings at 635 Slaters Lane. Those condos were followed by another 54 from Abramson Properties, which began selling units at 801 North Fairfax last fall. The 60K SF building used to be an office property occupied by the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce. 

Alexandria Economic Development Partnership Vice President of Real Estate Christina Mindrup said there are a few structural factors of the city's office buildings that make them especially attractive for residential conversions. 

She said that Alexandria tends to have buildings with smaller floor plates than more major cities, and the office buildings also tend to stand alone rather than join together, lending themselves to an easier conversion. 

Carr Cos. is in the process of converting Waterman Place at 901 North Pitt St. in Old Town North, where the developer is transforming a 1980s-era, three-story building to 250 units with ground-floor retail. 

American Real Estate Partners plans to commence construction of City House Old Town at 1101 King St. in the fall, with plans to redevelop it into a seven-story mixed-use building with 210 residential units and ground-floor office and retail, according to Alexandria’s year-end report. The project is expected to deliver in 2025, AREP co-founder and President Brian Katz told Bisnow in an email. 

He said the building is located in a “bustling residential, restaurant and retail corridor,” and its proximity to various transit options make it especially attractive for residential. 

Like AREP’s project at 1101 King St., most of the conversion projects in the city are near Old Town, Mindrup told Bisnow. 

In Old Town North, the city has a program to allow developers to build an extra 30% of density, in exchange for including a space for community arts use and providing the arts use with free rent for 30 years.

She said the city is also good at working with the state government to help developers tap into incentives to build. After a financing incentive from the city stalled as the Heron building at 699 Prince St. — a former office building for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children — was being redeveloped, the city helped it acquire funds from the Tourism Development Financing Program that allowed it to move forward. 

“It’s being able to tap into the state and some of the programs to identify opportunities, and I think you’re going to see more and more of that coming as more and more of these office buildings become obsolete and/or vacant,” she said. 

Alexandria has been ahead of the curve on conversions, which picked up steam after EYA delivered the Oronoco in 2014, a 60-unit waterfront conversion of the office building that formerly housed the Sheet Metal Workers International Association. The city then conducted a study in 2017 looking at possibilities for obsolete office space. 

It's not certain how many more Alexandria office-to-residential conversions could be in the pipeline, and developers and economic leaders say that given rising interest rates and construction costs, the trajectory will probably slow down. But Contreras is confident that the opportunity is still there.

“There's probably still a lot of opportunities, and it's just dependent on having the right team to work on them,” she said.

CORRECTION, AUG. 20 9:45 P.M. ET: A previous version of this story misidentified the delivery estimate for City House Old Town. It has been updated.