From Offices to Homes (and Back Again): Not Everything Can —or Should— Be Repurposed

Survival demands adaptation, and like life itself, the real estate market reinvents itself to stay standing. Hence, the revolving door where homes become offices and offices become homes.

That back-and-forth plays out in concrete cases. Insurgentes Sur 1915, in Mexico City, operated for decades with overlapping uses. Some of its units, such as apartment 1002, originally served as medical or legal offices and were converted into homes in the 1990s, and now operate once again as workspaces. A similar story unfolded in High Park Polanco: planned initially with one tower for residences and another for offices, demand for housing prevailed, and both towers became residential. Some have even turned this rotation into a business model: Vitant, a BE Grand initiative, has transformed former office buildings into residential developments across the country.

It’s not a trend; it’s a symptom. The revolving door between housing and offices isn’t driven by whim, but by structural mismatches between supply, demand, and land use. Behind every conversion lies an unresolved tension: office space that exceeds demand, and housing falling short in places where land yields more as commerce. The result is a deep recalibration in cities shifting their pace, scale, and priorities, where capital that no longer finds returns, finds opportunity.

That opportunity is already visible. According to SiiLA, one in four corporate buildings contains at least one space with structural vacancy—that is, left empty for more than three consecutive years. Some of those spaces—nearly 10% of the total square footage—could be repurposed not only as housing but also as storage facilities, as seen with the Mirax Tower in Naucalpan, now used by logistics firm MICO.

Repurposing becomes even more relevant in light of the housing shortage. Today, 2% of Mexican families are without housing, and 40% live in homes that fail to meet basic quality standards. That’s the true underserved market. But for need to become opportunity, spaces must not only be transformed—they must also be rentable or purchasable at accessible prices. Otherwise, they’ll remain empty, even with a new use.

Nonetheless, there’s also room to convert homes into offices. According to INEGI data, more than 4% of the housing stock in Mexico’s major cities—including Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey—is underutilized as residential space, but has the size, services, and legal certainty needed to support productive activity.¹

That underuse isn’t limited to what’s inside homes. Some local governments, such as Mexico City’s, estimate that up to 20% of urban capacity in certain serviced areas is underutilized. This suggests that waste is not just about buildings: entire neighborhoods could be activated without pouring a single new square foot of concrete.

That’s why repurposing is no automatic solution. It comes with costs, constraints, and risks. Every transformation must respond to a genuine market need and yield a product that can compete effectively. Changing a space’s use means little if, due to a lack of vision, diagnosis, or urban sensitivity, it ends up just as empty. The key is to read carefully: what’s missing, what’s oversupplied, and what’s stuck. Only then does repurposing stop being reactionary and become strategic.

To explore that potential through data, visit SiiLA Market Analytics or write to us at contacto@siila.com.mx.

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¹ Estimate by SiiLA based on Mexico’s 2020 Population and Housing Census (INEGI). The analysis considered inhabited homes located in towns with more than 100,000 residents (TAMLOC = 5), with at least three rooms (TOTCUART ≥ 3), access to piped water, electricity, sewage, internet (value 7), and registered property deeds. These homes account for 4.12% of the national total. The analysis was conducted in R (v. 4.5.1) and is fully replicable.