Real Estate Makeovers Booming

Recycling real estate is chic.
By: Ellen Florian Kratz: REALTOR® Magazine Online
A former mental health facility in Dover, N.H., is now a residential village with a golf course. The gymnasium of a former Albuquerque, N.M., high school is a condo. And developers are trying to persuade the Bethlehem, Pa., city fathers to rezone Bethlehem Steel’s corporate headquarters so it can be converted to luxury dwellings, ranging in price from $700,000 to $1.4 million.

In Maine, a defunct nuclear power plant and the acreage surrounding it is set to become an old-fashioned waterfront village filled with shopping, art galleries, condominiums, and cottages, and 281 slips for those who wish to park their boats in the Sheepscot River.

“Adaptive reuse has gotten big,” says Rob Dickson, the Albuquerque developer who overhauled the old high school. “Extending infrastructure is expensive and drives housing prices up. A lot of developers like me are saying, ‘We need to fill in.’”