There's a “Coming Soon” sign up at 2625 Ridgewood Road in Northeast Jackson, where a modest Class B office building called Eastover Commons is being reborn as The Lofts at Eastover. The pitch on the sign is simple: “New, Luxury Style Lofts.” The strategy behind it is more interesting than the marketing.

The developer is State Street Group, the Jackson firm founded in 1971 by J. Kane Ditto, the former two-term mayor of Jackson, who remains the company's principal. Day-to-day operations run through president Justin Peterson. Grant Ethridge Construction, out of Lafayette, is the general contractor, and Ridgeland's Dean Architecture is handling design. The building is being converted into roughly 15 loft-style apartments, one and two bedrooms, ranging from about 530 to 1,190 square feet, with asking rents listed between $1,321 and $2,630 a month.

What makes this worth a commercial real estate reader's attention isn't that it's an office conversion. It's that it isn't being driven by office distress.

The national story everyone knows is empty towers and gutted downtowns, conversions born of desperation. That isn't what's happening here. The I-55 and Lakeland corridor where this building sits has an office vacancy rate around 10.7 percent, one of the tightest submarkets in the metro. This building wasn't bleeding tenants. State Street simply ran the numbers and saw that apartment rents on this corridor, $1,300 to $2,600 a door, clear the economics of small office suites that once rented for a few hundred dollars a month. When multifamily rents have climbed more than 20 percent since 2020 and office rents have barely moved, the better use of an aging office asset becomes obvious. This is optimization, not triage.

And State Street has run this exact play before. In 2018, the firm converted upstairs office space along Lakeland Drive into a dozen units it called The Quarter Lofts. In 2024, it took over Walthall Lofts and The Courthouse downtown, leasing a large block of those units to Jackson State for student housing. The Lofts at Eastover is the same template at a familiar scale: take a tired commercial building in a good location, reposition it as residential, keep it in-house to manage. For a firm that owns more than 35 assets and 2.3 million square feet, adaptive reuse isn't an experiment. It's a line of business.

The location does the selling. The site sits a block off Lakeland, less than a mile from I-55, and within easy reach of UMMC, St. Dominic and Baptist, a built-in renter base of medical workers, plus the restaurants and walkability of nearby Fondren. The “Eastover” name borrows shine from the upscale enclave and the larger District at Eastover development nearby, though this is a separate, smaller project.

For the broader market, the signal is the takeaway. If a developer is converting office to residential in a 10-percent-vacancy submarket, it says the rent gap between the two uses has gotten wide enough that conversion pays even where office isn't failing. Watch whether State Street announces a second phase or a downtown conversion next. If it does, this stops being a one-off and becomes a pipeline.

The Lofts at Eastover is taking applications now.