Metro Loft Management

Metro Loft is a New York developer that specializes in converting older commercial buildings into residential space, a niche it helped pioneer in Lower Manhattan. Led by Nathan Berman, the firm has turned several Financial District office towers into apartments and has become a reference point as cities look to office-to-residential conversion for housing. Metro Loft is a co-developer of SoMA at 25 Water Street, the largest such conversion in the country, alongside GFP Real Estate. Its expertise is in the hard parts of conversion: reworking deep floor plates, mechanical systems and facades that were never designed for housing.

Metro Loft Management works one specialised corner of New York real estate, turning commercial buildings into places to live, and it does so across the full arc of a project. Real estate acquisition, development management, leasing and resident services sit alongside the core commercial-to-residential conversion and adaptive reuse redevelopment work, which means the firm can buy a building, convert it, lease it and then manage life inside it rather than handing off at each stage.
The track record behind that is substantial. Metro Loft reports more than 9,300 residential units and over 8 million square feet of commercial-to-residential conversions across more than thirty years, a body of work that puts real numbers behind its claim to have helped pioneer the approach in Lower Manhattan. Converting office floors into apartments is an intricate problem, light, layout, plumbing and structure all have to be rethought, and depth like that is hard to shortcut.
The firm’s role at 111 Wall Street shows the model in practice. Metro Loft brought its large-scale conversion expertise to the InterVest-led redevelopment there, repositioning the tower as 1,580 residential units. As cities look to office-to-residential conversion to answer both vacant office space and housing demand, a developer that can acquire, convert, lease and operate under one roof, and that has done it at this scale in New York, occupies a specific and useful niche.
Leasing and resident services are the parts of the model that outlast construction. Once a converted building opens, filling it and running it day to day is its own discipline, and keeping that in-house means the team that designed the conversion also understands how it lives once occupied. Adaptive reuse redevelopment sits behind all of it, the broader practice of taking a building made for one purpose and remaking it for another, which is what commercial-to-residential conversion is at its core. For a city weighing what to do with aging office stock, a firm that can carry a building from acquisition through to occupied apartments is a rare kind of partner.