Across North-West Europe (NWE), cities face a pressing paradox: a severe lack of affordable and social housing, yet a growing number of vacant office buildings that no longer meet modern needs. With hundreds of thousands of housing units missing in countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and France, the social and economic costs of inaction are increasing. 

At the same time, urban areas are constrained by land scarcity and under pressure to meet ambitious climate and circular economy targets. Office buildings constructed between the 1970s and 1990s—often poorly insulated, oversized, and unsuited to contemporary business use—represent a dormant resource. Their transformation into homes offers an untapped solution to address housing shortages, reduce the environmental footprint of construction, and preserve already urbanised land. 

Yet, turning offices into homes is far from simple. Technical hurdles flourish: how to adapt the structure, add balconies, redesign interiors, and ensure affordability—all while maximizing the reuse of materials and minimizing emissions. The circular building economy, though promising, remains immature and fragmented, lacking the standardised solutions needed for widespread adoption. 

The Circular Building Convert project (CBC) was born to tackle these interlinked challenges. Through two full-scale pilot projects in Lille (France) and Heerlen (Netherlands), we will be developing and testing replicable, cost-effective, and circular conversion methods. These local experiences will feed into a transnational strategy and a training programme, ensuring that the know-how developed benefits the entire NWE region, and endures beyond the project’s lifetime. 

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This was a key factor in the team at RetroKit in designing a cloud based database solution to work with and support decision making. With over 50 years of retrofitting experience between them, the founders used their knowledge of the industry and the challenges involved to create a software solution that uses BER data and GIS. It then applies advanced analytics to this data to develop a highly detailed analysis of retrofitting measures, that are evidence based, have the highest potential for success, and can underpin the development of a retrofitting strategy at scale, while taking account of project specific considerations.

The advanced data analytics software can identify the dwellings that will most benefit from home energy upgrading, prioritising based on a project’s specific parameters and KPIs such as BER rating, heat loss indications, CO2 emissions, energy costs, etc. The software can also prioritise based on location (taking an area based approach) and by dwelling archetype (eg, main heating fuel, age of construction, wall type, etc). Without the software, this would be a hugely labour intensive manual task, which few project teams would have the available resources to undertake.

Through warmer homes and reduced energy bills, the benefits range from climate action, to health and wellbeing, to the eradication of fuel poverty and employment creation. To meet its emission reduction targets and for Ireland to play its part in limiting global warming to within 1.5C, energy use in homes must be addressed and scaled rapidly. Retrofitting is one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of achieving a sizeable reduction in our national emissions footprint, improving living standards and lifestyles at the same time. Powerful data analytics are a key component in expediating the move from project planning, to prioritisation, to ultimately action. 

At RetroKit our mission is to empower our clients. RetroKit’s cloud-based digital platform is dedicated to upscaling energy retrofit in housing and we estimate the database can reduce the cost of planning a large scale energy retrofit project by between 70 and 80%, whilst also delivering better investment decisions. Step one of this is building the customisable database. Get in touch with us to learn more.