Dallas-Fort Worth has more office vacancy than any market in Texas. Millions of square feet of Class B and C office space sitting empty in urban cores while housing demand keeps climbing.
The math is obvious. Convert the offices to apartments.
The execution is not.
18
Adaptive Reuse Projects
$950M
Adaptive Reuse Portfolio
3,000+
Multifamily Units Delivered
Office-to-residential conversion requires a contractor who understands two things at once: how to work inside existing structures where the floor plates, column spacing, mechanical systems, and building codes were never designed for residential use — and how to deliver multifamily housing at a scale that makes the economics work.
Most contractors come at it from one side. Adaptive reuse specialists who understand existing structures but haven’t delivered thousands of residential units. Or multifamily builders who know unit delivery but have never opened a wall and found conditions that weren’t on any drawing.
ANDRES has spent 30 years building both. Eighteen adaptive reuse projects totaling $950M. Thousands of multifamily units across DFW. The convergence of those two capabilities is precisely what this building type demands.
That’s not a track record in office-to-residential. It’s a capability convergence — and nobody in this market brings both sides.
Floor plates don’t cooperate. Office floor plates are deeper and wider than residential. The column grid that worked for open-plan cubicle layouts doesn’t align with apartment unit plans. Every unit must be designed around columns you can’t move. Same challenge Carlos Trevino solved at Cabana, where 300 hotel rooms became apartments within a structural grid that dictated everything.
Mechanical systems get ripped out. Office HVAC is centralized. Residential is distributed — individual units need individual systems. You’re rethinking ductwork routing, electrical distribution, plumbing stacks, and fire suppression, all within existing floor-to-floor heights that weren’t designed for residential ceiling requirements.
The code changes underneath you. Office occupancy codes and residential occupancy codes are different animals. Egress, fire separation, sound transmission, natural light requirements, window operability — the building that was compliant as an office may need significant structural and systems work to achieve residential certification.
And then there’s what you find. Every existing building hides conditions that don’t appear on drawings. Corroded rebar. Structural sag from decades of load. Asbestos where nobody expected it. The only preparation for these discoveries is a team that has encountered them before — and knows how to solve them without stopping the project.
ANDRES has opened walls, drilled through slabs, and worked inside the mechanical cavities of 18 different existing structures across Texas. That accumulated knowledge — what you find, where you find it, and how to resolve it — doesn’t exist in a database. It lives in the team.
Carlos Trevino. 15 years of adaptive reuse at ANDRES. Column tolerance cascades, unforeseen rebar conditions, asbestos sequencing, elevator dispositions, structural failures hidden behind finished surfaces. Done.
The building doesn’t care what it’s being converted from. It only cares whether the team inside it has seen this before.
Office vacancy in DFW’s urban cores keeps climbing as remote and hybrid work patterns reshape demand for commercial space. Class B and C office buildings — many built in the 1970s and 1980s — face a structural obsolescence that no tenant improvement budget can solve.
At the same time, DFW’s population growth keeps driving residential demand that new construction alone can’t meet.
Surplus office supply. Deficit residential supply. Same urban locations. That’s the opportunity.
Cities are responding with zoning flexibility, tax incentives, and expedited permitting. The federal government has signaled support for adaptive reuse as a housing production strategy. The financing structures — including historic tax credits for qualifying buildings — are increasingly familiar to Texas lenders.
The contractors who can execute these conversions are not yet established. This is a capability convergence opportunity, not an established market with entrenched players. ANDRES’s 18-project adaptive reuse portfolio and multifamily scale position us to lead in a sector that doesn’t yet have a clear leader.
Portfolio
The National
Dallas, TX
52 stories, 1M SF, office-to-residential at the largest scale in Dallas history ($460M).
Cabana
Dallas Design District, TX
Hotel-to-residential conversion: 300 hotel rooms to apartments within existing structural grid.
Corrigan Tower
Dallas, TX
18-story mid-century high-rise to 150 apartments ($100M+ renovation).
Dallas Power & Light
Dallas, TX
Three 1931 Art Deco buildings to 200 apartments.
Aloft Hotel
Dallas, TX
Government depository to 193 hotel rooms (structural sag, robotic total station leveling).
Mosaic
Dallas, TX
Fidelity Union Life Building to 440 apartments (National Register of Historic Places).
Gables Republic Tower
Dallas, TX
1954 office building to luxury apartments (NAHB Best Adaptive Reuse 2008).
People Also Ask
Is office-to-residential conversion actually feasible?
Depends on the building. Floor plate depth, column spacing, floor-to-floor height, and structural system all determine whether a conversion pencils. Not every office building can become apartments — but the ones that can represent significant untapped housing supply. The feasibility analysis is a preconstruction exercise, and it requires a contractor who has worked inside enough existing structures to assess conditions accurately before the drawings are done.
What makes office-to-residential harder than new multifamily construction?
Everything about the existing building. The structure was designed for a different use — different loads, different mechanical systems, different code requirements, different floor plans. You’re solving problems that don’t exist in new construction: column grids that don’t align with unit plans, mechanical systems that need complete replacement within constrained ceiling cavities, and conditions that appear when you open the first wall. The contractor’s existing-building experience is the single most important variable.
Does ANDRES have office-to-residential conversion experience?
We haven’t completed a standalone office-to-residential conversion. What we bring is the deepest adaptive reuse portfolio in Texas — 18 projects, $950M — and the multifamily scale to deliver residential outcomes at volume. The National was itself a large-scale conversion to residential. Every adaptive reuse challenge that defines office-to-residential work — structural unknowns, code transitions, mechanical system replacement — is work we’ve done repeatedly across different building types.
How does ANDRES evaluate whether an office building is a good conversion candidate?
We start with a physical investigation of the building’s existing conditions. Structural capacity. Floor-to-floor heights. Column spacing relative to efficient residential unit plans. Mechanical system condition and routing options. Facade condition. Environmental concerns. This isn’t a desktop exercise — it requires people who have been inside these buildings before and can tell the difference between a feasible conversion and an expensive lesson.
What incentives are available for office-to-residential conversions in Texas?
Several: historic tax credits for qualifying buildings (state and federal), Tax Increment Financing in designated districts, municipal zoning flexibility and expedited permitting, and emerging federal programs targeting adaptive reuse for housing production. The specific incentive stack depends on the building’s location, age, historic status, and the municipality’s priorities. ANDRES has run historic tax credit processes across multiple projects, including $100M in HTCs at Cathedral Guadalupe.
The Building Already Exists. The Question Is Who Can Convert It.
If you’re evaluating an office building for residential conversion, the first step isn’t drawings — it’s a walk through the building with a team that has been inside 18 others. We’ll tell you what we see, what we expect to find behind the walls, and whether the conversion pencils.