designed to comply or designed to stand out?

Retrofitting should be outperforming new-build commercially. But it isn’t.

Retrofit schemes are forced to compete with new-build developments on the latter’s terms: BCO guidance, housing standards, retail specifications, spreadsheet viability. They are playing a game that was never designed for them to win. As a result, they have to work twice as hard just to be considered.

This is because retrofit is still largely processed through the prism of policy rather than the market.

But even policy is no longer a reliable vehicle. Under political pressure to demonstrate that they are stimulating economic growth, local authorities are often discreetly sacrificing their long-standing retrofit-first commitments in favour of new-build schemes that have better optics: promises of regeneration, job creation, London’s global financial competitiveness.

So what’s in it for developers to bother with retrofitting at all, if new-build appears to achieve stronger returns and policy is no longer a constraint? What appears to be new-build’s advantage, like efficiency, certainty, and standards, is also what makes it interchangeable. Predictable. Generic. It competes on comparables. But leasing decisions are not made on standards alone, but on identity, desire, taste and aspiration. Such should the design and leasing discourse be reframed. And this where retrofitting can come to its own.

Retrofit does not have to compete on the same terms. It is, by default, a one-off. It can capitalise on what already exists - architecture, character, history- as qualities that can be leveraged to drive stronger asset positioning. The real shift is to define retrofit as a separate market category, a market sui generis, with its own logic of value, its own lexicon and its own levers of shaping demand.

If it achieves that shift, retrofit no longer needs to justify itself against new-build. It can compete on its own terms - and potentially outperform.