You’re looking at Melbourne’s CBD and you can see the opportunity. Office vacancy sits at 18%, the highest in the country, and buildings that once had a single purpose are now asking a different question: what else could this be?Due diligence is expensive. Testing a site, reading a neighbourhood, understanding what a building can genuinely hold takes months before you know whether a deal stacks up. Most of the time, you’re working from instinct and incomplete information. Good sites get missed. Time gets spent on deals that don’t stack up.
We built something to change that.
AdaptAbility is a new tool from Plus Studio that identifies underused commercial buildings across the City of Melbourne with real potential for adaptive reuse.
It works across workplace, hospitality, hotels, mixed use and residential typologies, drawing on live data and our hands-on experience delivering adaptive reuse projects in this city.It will tell you where to begin. Which buildings, which locations, which neighbourhoods have genuine conversion potential, before you commit to a direction. What once took months of preliminary investigation can now be tested in a fraction of the time.
The policy framework is already in place. The City of Melbourne’s Retrofit Melbourne Plan and Guidelines for the Adaptive Reuse of Office Buildings have set the direction. Globally, adaptive reuse is accelerating fast. In the US alone, more than 70,000 apartments were converted from office buildings in 2025. In Melbourne, the gap between what the vacancy data suggests is possible and what’s actually getting off the ground comes down to one thing: the intelligence layer has been missing.
AdaptAbility is that layer.
If you’re a developer actively looking at sites in Melbourne, we’d welcome the conversation. Reach out to explore what AdaptAbility can show you.
