This is not a how to or step by step guide in turning an existing apartment complex into condominiums. For the most part, any decent real estate attorney can help you draw up ‘Condo Documents’ and have them registered with relative ease and for a reasonable fee. For less than $10,000, you can convert apartments […]
Originally written February 2013 · updated June 2026.
This isn’t a step-by-step guide to turning an apartment complex into condos. Honestly, the legal part is the easy part — any decent real estate attorney can draw up the Condo Documents and register them for a reasonable fee. For under $10,000 you can convert apartments into condominiums and suddenly have 6, 12, 25 or more units to sell.
But should you?
That’s the real question, and it’s the one this is written to answer — for the developer or owner trying to decide whether converting is worth the time, money, and risk. (Richmond’s condo inventory has swung hard over the years — from 400-plus units on the market in 2009/10 down to roughly 100 a few years later. You can see where it stands today on our market stats page.)
Design is everything — and here’s the fundamental tension: the best apartment buildings are designed to maximize rental revenue, while the best condo buildings are designed to maximize sale revenue. The average for-rent unit runs about 10–15% smaller than a comparable for-sale unit. Tax-credit math and revenue maximization push apartment design toward smaller units and higher unit counts. A successful condo is the exact opposite. Put bluntly: if your “2-bedroom” is 750 square feet and one (or both) of those bedrooms has a dimension under 10 feet, the market will treat it as a one-bedroom — and price it accordingly.
Buyers almost always walk in looking for a 2-bedroom. They may end up in a 1-bedroom, but nearly always one with a second space that can flex as a guest room or office. Outside the VCU/medical market (more on that below), most units need to be “two-function” spaces. The catch: the most successful apartment buildings run 60–70% one-bedroom units — a sub-optimal mix for a condo.
Yes. Across 20-plus projects we’ve represented since 2007, we’ve had almost zero success selling tenant-occupied units. The reasons vary — logistics, cleanliness, motivation, scheduling — but the real one is the appearance of a developer who isn’t fully committed to the conversion. Your buyer is very likely fleeing apartment life: the noise, the indifferent management, the repairman who never shows. A clear signal that the building is becoming condos is paramount. The rent you give up is more than made up in the price you can fetch.
In almost every case, yes — especially if the existing finish level sits below what today’s buyer expects.
The math shifts inside those two bubbles. Good news: pricing is fairly set, and it’s driven by the rental market — if a parent can buy for less than they’d pay to rent, they buy; if not, they don’t. Bad news: the gorgeous design and high-end finishes are largely lost on parents. It’s about the numbers. And one-bedroom units actually work better here — med students want cheap, close, and quiet.
Ask a Realtor — and don’t assume each floor is automatically worth more than the one below it. Value comes from a blend of layout, bedroom count, view, parking, outdoor space, and light, and those swing dramatically within a single building — enough to move value 30% or more. The best apartment developers think in rent per foot per month, where the high-to-low spread is tightly banded. A condo developer has to think in price per unit — and the market punishes a flawed unit harshly.
Condo finance is the most complicated, convoluted corner of the entire mortgage world, and it can’t be explained in a few sentences (we’ve written plenty about warrantability if you want to go deep). A lender who knows all the workarounds can be the difference between a project that sells and one that stalls. Do not — under any circumstances — work with a mortgage company that hasn’t been an exclusive lender in a new or converted condo community. I can’t say that strongly enough.
The ideal conversion: a mid-sized building (25–30 units), less than 20% commercial space, a majority of 2-bedrooms, in an area people actually want to live. It helps enormously to be near VCU’s Monroe Park or VCU Medical (built-in demand), to sit where rent-per-foot has flattened or the building needs refurbishing anyway, to be phaseable (financing gets easier), and to have secure parking.
Two warnings. Don’t assume a good apartment building makes a good condo building. And don’t assume that just because a market is under-supplied, any conversion will work. Buyers have long memories about projects that went sideways, and they don’t hand out leaps of faith. Bring the right project to the market the right way and you’ll be rewarded. Bring the wrong one — or the right one the wrong way — and the market will punish the mistake.
Rick
