Value of NYC existing-building work climbs to $9.3B in 2016

Dive Brief:

Renovations and alterations (A&R) to existing New York City buildings totaled $9.3 billion in 2016, according to a New York Building Congress analysis of Dodge Data & Analytics permit data.
2016 marked the third-straight year that A&R work has increased. Renovations and upgrades averaged $9 billion a year between 2014 and 2016, up from a 2011-2013 annual average of $5.6 billion.
The commercial segment — which includes office, hotel and retail space, as well as office renovations and upgrades — saw the most activity last year, representing 46% of all commercial A&R. Institutional work — such as schools, hospitals, government buildings — made up 35% of all A&R permits, and multifamily represented 16%.

Dive Insight:

NYBC President and CEO Carlo Scissura said in a release that interior A&R work is "the unsung hero" of the city's building boom as the new, high-profile New York City projects garner most of the attention. A driver of this A&R activity, he said, were building owners who wanted to make their offices more efficient, technologically up to date and more sustainable.

When sustainable construction comes up, many first think of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED standard, but there is a new sustainability certification in the U.S. that deals exclusively with existing buildings — the BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) standard.

A U.K. import, the organization announced its entry into the U.S. market last August, and just last month it issued its first BREEAM USA In-Use certification to The Oaks, a 1.3 million-square-foot shopping mall in Thousand Oaks, CA. While any existing building is eligible, BREEAM officials have said their target market is the approximately 6 million square feet of office space that is not suitable for other green-building certifications.

Adaptive reuse projects would also be represented in the NYBC's A&R figures. These types of projects have always been a presence in the A&R world, particularly in cities like New York that want to maintain certain building features — often for its historic value — but are looking to change its use. Across the U.S., developers are taking on more of these adaptive reuse projects in an effort to revitalize spaces and communities.