Architects Uncover Tenfold Reuse Potential in Melbourne’s City Centre

The top nine levels of a 1970s mixed-use building on Melbourne’s Bourke Street, formerly leased to RMIT, are being converted into 487 units for 889 student beds. Designed to identify projects of precisely this kind, Plus Studio’s AdaptAbility tool has uncovered nearly 10 times as many buildings suitable for adaptive reuse in the City of Melbourne compared to a previous industry study. Given years of policy support for the sector, the findings highlight a blind spot in the city’s ageing office stock. Built by Plus Studio and led by the firm’s digital innovation specialist, Michael Khoo, the tool scores buildings against publicly available data covering construction age, floor plate depth, heritage listing, current use and ownership structure. Outputs are generated separately for build-to-sell, build-to-rent and student accommodation potential, alongside an AI-generated commentary that flags recent news or changes not captured in the dataset. Of 12,565 buildings in the Melbourne CBD, AdaptAbility has identified 980 buildings as feasible for build-to-sell conversion, including 582 rated as prime candidates. For build-to-rent, 74 are rated feasible, including 44 prime candidates. This compares to 85 buildings flagged in an earlier study by Hassell that considered only office-to-residential conversion within the CBD. Plus Studio director Ian Briggs says the “factor of 10 increase” is not attributed to any error in the earlier analysis, but “what is considered a viable option now, rather than what it would have been 5 or 10 years ago”. ▲ A screenshot from the AdaptAbility tool showing build-to-rent scoring across a mapped Melbourne precinct. Rather than assessing one site at a time, developers and government bodies can screen the entire Melbourne City Council area for candidates, then hone in on ownership and possible negotiation details for individual sites. “The tool is almost like the initial meeting that an architect would have with a client,” he tells The Urban Developer , “but on a city-wide scale”. Deeper floor plates, once considered a barrier to residential conversion, favour build-to-rent and student accommodation projects because communal space can occupy low-light interior areas. This widens the pool of eligible stock beyond previously identified buildings. Briggs says older office stock can compete directly with heritage buildings on conversion potential, meaning “a 1970s or 1980s office building is just as effective, if not more [so], than a heritage building for conversion”. The Bourke Street PBSA project is a case in point, where the top nine floors had been leased to RMIT before the university consolidated elsewhere. Khoo says the tool’s scoring was tested against Plus Studio’s own drawings for the Bourke Street building and came within a 5 per cent margin of error, a level of accuracy he considers sufficient for early stage site selection. Despite the scale of opportunity, Briggs says planning and building approval processes remain geared toward new construction rather than reuse, adding cost and complexity to conversions that meet current fire, access and glazing standards. ▲ The dashboard scoring the same precinct for build-to-rent potential, with 44 buildings rated Prime and 74 Feasible. “These types of projects are more aimed at long-term building owners rather than old-school developers getting in and flipping them,” he says. Adaptive reuse also has a broader benefit beyond individual balance sheets, according to Briggs, as “every building you don’t knock over is a carbon bank”. Office vacancy in the city is just under 20 per cent, a figure Briggs expects to keep climbing rather than reverse. Early discussions have taken place between Plus Studio, the Melbourne City Council and the state Department of Transport and Planning on using the data to guide infrastructure and housing diversity planning, alongside work to test the tool as a predictive model for future development activity beyond Melbourne. Briggs says the tool’s biggest value may lie less in individual deals than in starting conversations with owners who have no clear plan for buildings sitting idle. “This tool unlocks all of the undiscovered [space], and lets people start to actually talk,” he says. “At least if they realise they’re sitting on something valuable, that conversation starts, whereas before, it never did.”

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Leon Della Bosca
Wed 19 Aug 26

Architects Uncover Tenfold Reuse Potential in Melbourne’s City Centre

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