Conversion Potential Assessment Tool

What is it about?

Building owners and other stakeholders can adopt different strategies to cope with vacancy, such as consolidation, rent reduction, selling the building, renovation, transformation and conversion to adapted reuse, or demolish and build a new building. This book chapter discusses various tools to cope with vacancy by adaptive reuse. It presents an overview of the many factors and aspects that enable or hinder adaptive reuse by conversion of (office) buildings into housing, and how to assess the characteristics of the market, location, building and involved stakeholders. Furthermore, it presents the Conversion Meter, a tool to assess the conversion potential of vacant office buildings into housing. The tool is built up from a first quick scan using veto criteria (Step 1) till a more detailed scan of the conversion potential based on gradual criteria (Step 2). No single gradual criterion is sufficient to decide if conversion is possible or not; it is the combination of all criteria i.e. the sum that provides a valuable indicator for the conversion potential. Step 3 calculates a conversion potential score as a weighted sum of all criteria. Step 4 is a scan on financial feasibility. The final Step 5 is a check on possible risks and opportunities to eliminate these risks. The chapter continues with lessons learned from case studies by applying the Conversion Meter.

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