While rumors swirl that Jerome Powell is paying his own legal bills while dealing with the DOJ, and the Administration is ruminating on using 401(k) or 529 funds to buy a home, in the land of “concrete news” the office-to-apartment and condo conversion trend is accelerating, with the number of units repurposed from office buildings more than tripling since 2022 and the conversion pipeline expanding by 28 percent between 2024 and 2025. Do you have the loan products for them? The total pipeline has now reached 70,700 units, with major metros like New York (8,310 units), Washington, D.C. (6,533 units), and Los Angeles (4,388 units) leading the way. Notably, office-to-apartment projects account for large shares of projects in places like Omaha (85 percent), Dallas (79 percent), and Minneapolis (78 percent). There is a growing shift toward repurposing newer office spaces built between the 1990s and 2010s. Office conversions now make up 42 percent of all future adaptive reuse apartments, up from 38 percent in 2024, and nearly 15 percent of office buildings nationwide are deemed viable for transformation. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s are sponsored by Figure. Take advantage of Figure’s technology and products like its fixed HELOC, DSCR loan, piggyback loan, and direct debt paydown, helping you serve more of your existing network and expand into new markets. Hear an interview with Worthy Performance Group’s Laura Lasher on why many lenders will fail to capitalize on a rate-driven rebound, what truly differentiates winning loan officers, how competitive dynamics have shifted toward larger institutions, which training investments genuinely improve performance, and the warning signs that signal an organization is unprepared for the next market cycle.)