Old buildings offer untapped market possibilities for Opportunity Zone Funds, developers, brokers, property owners, and community stakeholders. After studying Vacant Land last week, my interest shifted to parcels within the Opportunity Zones that had existing buildings constructed before 1970. Speculating, I assumed these buildings were either in need of renovation or near the end of their life cycle, being almost 50 years old. What I found was that approximately 70 percent of all the parcels have existing buildings built before 1970, that’s around 13,571 properties!
This led me to investigate a bit further. Exactly how much buildable area is possible on parcels with old buildings?
Here is a map of all the parcels with old buildings:
I applied the same rules as the Vacant Land study and broke down the parcels by potential development size:
Large Development Opportunities: There are 36 individual parcels, each allowing for an estimated total gross buildable area exceeding 250,000 SF.
Medium Development Opportunities: There are 339 individual parcels, each allowing for an estimated total gross buildable area of 50,000 to 249,999 SF.
Small Development Opportunities: There are 13,199 individual parcels, each allowing for an estimated total gross buildable area of 0 to 49,999 SF.
Due to the number of parcels within the small development range, we could imagine that land assembly strategies will most likely take place.
Here are a few scenarios I built with the Deepblocks software:
LARGE
Total Buildable:
383,716 SF
Zoning Type:
T6-36A-O
Return on Cost:
9.79%
MEDIUM
Total Buildable:
117,813 SF
Zoning Type:
T6-8-O
Return on Cost:
9.12%
SMALL
Total Buildable:
29,239 SF
Zoning Type:
T6-8-O
Return on Cost:
9.65%
Happy to share the same report, in any city, with anyone interested.