The business world has experienced upheavals in the organization of work in recent years, particularly in the tertiary sector. Changes in methods, the explosion of teleworking or the introduction of flex-office are changing habits. All this also has an effect on the place where we work: the office.
With this new situation, office real estate must adapt its offer. Companies no longer necessarily need as much space as before: large meetings of 20 around a table are no longer popular and we prefer small spaces for more dynamic and more team meetings. short, teleworking has become widespread, employees want to come by bike or by public transport… All of this means that companies now prefer premises that are less spacious but better located.
“Before we counted 15 m² per employee, this went down to 5 m². We now prefer fewer square meters but more square meters”summarizes Kevin Maruszak, director of national development at Foncière de Transformation Immobilière (FTI), a company specializing in the transformation of offices into housing.
The FTI, Linkcity and La Place de l'Immobilier created the Consortium of Offices in France (CBF) with the aim of quantifying the French office stock, measuring its evolution and in particular assessing the share of empty and obsolete buildings. In a context of housing crisis, the idea is also to find square meters already built that can be transformed into residential.
The CBF communicated exclusively to West France the result of careful work to quantify the office real estate stock in France. This study required crossing numerous public and real estate data, and applying mathematical models.
2 million square meters of fallow land
According to the CBF estimate, there are currently nearly 173 million square meters of offices in France. In this park, 37 million square meters belong to the public sector (State and communities), 47 million to the private non-market sector (companies that own their offices), and 89 million square meters are in the market park (properties of investors who rent them).
The CBF counts buildings of more than 1,000 m² solely dedicated to offices. Of the 89 million square meters held by the commercial park, 9.2 million are currently unoccupied. Within these unoccupied square meters, a little more than 2 million have been vacant and without a project for 2 years. These are therefore wastelands likely to be converted into housing.
Among the offices analyzed, more than 9 million square meters are currently available for rent, with 5.2 million in Île-de-France and 4 million in other regions. In this context, the CBF has identified 2 million square meters of wasteland, i.e. buildings of more than 1,000 square meters that have remained unoccupied for more than two years, which could be considered for transformation.
House 53,000 people
Île-de-France concentrates more than a third of the commercial office stock. The proportion rises to more than half for brownfield offices: 1.2 million square meters are in Île-de-France, and 800,000 m² in the regions. Empty offices are concentrated in particular in Hauts-de-Seine (482,000 m²) and in Paris (228,628 m²).
For the rest, office buildings that have been empty and without projects for more than 2 years are mainly located in large metropolises.
The Qualitel 2020 label estimates the average surface area of a home for a person aged 25 to 44 to be 38 m². By being transformed into housing, the 2 million square meters of empty offices could, within 5 years, house 53,000 people.
The map below shows the office space by department, and presents in a tooltip the proportion of empty offices, and the potential number of housing units created in the event of conversion into housing:
Transform into housing
As the country faces a major housing crisis, converting offices into housing has many advantages. But the process is not that simple to set up.
First of all, if businesses didn't want to set up somewhere, it's not obvious that people would want to live there. “The logics for working and living are differentexplains Kevin Maruszak, we seek to live in well-centered and located spaces, with good amenities (set of characteristics that make the environment pleasant, Editor's note). We don't do residential in the middle of a business park. »
Investors are also not inclined to mix offices and housing within the same building, with the complications that co-ownership can entail. Even if the famous Tour Bretagne in Nantes will bring together services and accommodation, it is imagined as two separate buildings.
Offices are generally very glazed, and require significant transformations. The standards are also different from those of housing. For Kevin Maruszak, it is necessary to encourage these transformations by “political will both nationally and on the part of local communities. »
A law brought by MoDem deputy for Ain Romain Daubié was to facilitate the conversion of offices into housing, but the dissolution of the National Assembly in June postponed its vote…
However, many projects are already underway. La Foncière de Transformation has currently launched 58 operations which concern a total of 300,000 m² of offices, which will be transformed into 5,500 housing units. Among them, 60% is social housing.
These transformations are also an opportunity to build better. The programs provide for upgrades to energy and environmental standards, with also, underlines Kevin Maruszak, the concern to “de-waterproof the floors and return square meters to nature. »
