As many cities nationwide are seeing more mostly vacant office buildings converted into apartment complexes, no city has seen more such projects since 2025 than Philadelphia, writes Florin Petrut for RentCafe.

Philadelphia saw its number of office-to-residential conversion projects increase 119 percent year-to-year.

This percentage is the highest growth rate among all of the top 20 metro regions nationwide, beating out Denver (114 percent) and St. Louis (110 percent) as the only three cities whose pipelines more than doubled since last year.

Philadelphia also increased its national rankings for its future office-to-apartment pipeline from No. 18 nationally to No. 7.

Philadelphia currently has 2,697 future office-to-apartment units in the pipeline, compared to about 1,200 at around this time last year.

In addition, these conversion projects now make up 46 percent of all future adaptive reuse activity across the Philadelphia metro.

The most prominent and largest of these conversion projects is the historic Wanamaker Building, which is planned to be converted into 600 apartments across its upper floors.

“With many downtown offices designated as landmark properties, conversions are often supported by preservation-focused incentives that allow buildings to be reused without altering their historic character,” RentCafe reports.

At the start of 2026, there were about 90,300 apartments nationwide in the process of conversion.

Read more about Philadelphia’s rapidly growing conversion pipeline at RentCafe.

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