Which office buildings are actually good conversion candidates?

Three hard screens, in order. Floor plate depth — past roughly 90 feet window-to-window and you get dark interiors no layout fixes. Plumbing — office cores cluster wet stacks centrally; residential wants them distributed, and re-running risers is where budgets die. Curtain wall — if it can't open or be cheaply modified, your operable-window requirement just bought a new facade.

A building has to pass all three before the incentive math is even worth running. Most towers fail at floor plate.

Grace's screens are exactly right. One addition from the affordable side: check whether the conversion incentive stacks with any housing subsidy, because the deals that truly pencil usually need both. The incentive alone rarely closes the gap on a hard conversion.