Empty offices in Switzerland could house 43,000 people

Finding an apartment is particularly difficult in cities such as Zurich, Lausanne and Geneva. At the same time, many office buildings on the outskirts of cities stand empty. Keystone / Christian Beutler

Empty office buildings in Switzerland could in theory accommodate 43,000 people, according to a report by Swiss public television, RTS. In Lausanne and Geneva, for example, unoccupied offices could house a total of 6,000 residents.

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According to CBRE, a commercial real estate agency in Zurich, there is currently about 2,000,000 m2 of empty office space in Switzerland.

A Swiss resident occupies on average 46.5 m2 of living space. Therefore, RTS estimates that if these empty offices were converted into housing, they could in theory accommodate 43,000 people, equivalent to a city the size of Fribourg in western Switzerland.

Finding an apartment is particularly difficult in cities such as Zurich, Lausanne and Geneva, where the apartment vacancy rates are below 1%. At the same time, there are many empty office buildings on the outskirts of cities.

The empty spaces could in theory house 6,000 people in Zurich, 4,000 in Geneva and 2,000 in Lausanne, according to RTS.

However, converting offices into housing remains an exception. Such transformations are complicated in Switzerland, particularly from a legal perspective.

Simon Chessex, from the Lacroix Chessex architectural firm in Geneva, specialises in this type of operation. He does not see the situation changing in the immediate future.

“The only hope is for exemptions. Changing the law would take far too much time. On the other hand, we could act on a case-by-case basis,” he told RTS.

For the owners of such premises, however, there is generally little motivation to convert an office into private housing.

Henrik Stump, a real estate developer in Zurich, had an 80-metre tower built that was completed in 2024; it remains half empty. But he has no intention of converting it into residential accommodation, as “the yield of an office building is always a little higher than for apartments. In addition, the construction costs are a little lower”, he says.

To do so, Stump would have to invest in renovations that involve a lower financial return. He prefers to wait until companies are interested in taking his premises in their current condition.

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It is therefore unlikely that many of the existing empty offices in Switzerland will be converted into private housing. Companies looking to move also want buildings that meet current standards, particularly in terms of energy efficiency.

But there is potential for conversions of old offices located far from city centres which no longer interest investors.

The Wincasa company recently carried out such a conversion in Zurich to create around 100 loft apartments.

Massimo Blangiardi, a manager at Wincasa, firmly believes that such transformations could help solve the housing crisis.

“We would have to be able to carry out a large number of projects to relieve the market congestion,” he told RTS.

Translated from French by DeepL/sb

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