What Is A Loft? - 4/11/06

With lofts being the hot new market niche in Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe, I get asked all the time "what is a loft?"With lofts being the hot new market niche in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, I get asked all the time "what is a loft?" I have to explain that Arizona's version of a loft is very different than what real estate agents in other parts of the country might think.

Back East, "real" lofts are residential condominiums created from the conversion of old warehouse buildings. Those old warehouses had very high ceilings (to accommodate industrial machinery or literally tons of storage), huge windows (to allow as much natural light as possible), industrial type finishes such as exposed concrete floors, exposed steel, exposed brick walls, exposed electrical conduit and heating and air conditioning ducts etc...

Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe are so much younger than cities like Chicago, New York and Detroit that we simply don't have the large old warehouses common in those other cities. So, out West, we don't have many residential lofts converted from industrial/warehouse space. Instead, we have loft "styled" condos; new buildings built with a lot of the same features found in the lofts out East (lots of brick, unfinished or stained concrete floors, floor to ceiling windows, etc.). Unfortunately, because we have few if any "true" lofts it leaves the door wide open for developers and real estate agents to use the word "loft" however they want. Because the word is so popular today it seems that almost everything is now called a loft.