Gas, electricity, and water all seem fairly easy and just a matter of money. (They’re all provided under pressure.) Sewer falls by gravity and so has more physical constraints on routing and access for clean outs.
Yeah - I've never understood this arguement, all the big buildings I've worked in have had electricity, water and sewerage - maybe not plumbed in the dispersed way that you get in residential but available throughout the buildin at any rate.
In addition to what everyone has already written, it might be worth pointing out that office buildings usually have a floor-to-ceiling distance far greater than residential buildings. So you can add in a bunch of piping directly underneath the floor, then create a new ceiling below the pipes, and the result is still very acceptable.
Second, the quirks are part of the charm [*]. Nobody is marketing these conversions as ultra-luxury units. The history of the building is celebrated, not hidden
[*]. For example, our building still has an operating mail chute system and I bet that it will be kept around after conversion.
The photo of the Roosevelt Hotel near the bottom shows what ours looks like on the office floors - floor to ceiling glass so you can see letters from above zip past on their way to the lobby.
The usage rates are vastly different. What do people in an office building use water for? Coffee, dishwashing, toilet flushing. Those will be somewhat dispersed through the day. Compared to a residential building where half of the building is having a shower in the space of an hour or so in the morning. So you need to get more water in and more water out, both of which probably need the pipes replaced, and more space to hold them (even more at the lower levels of the building). Similar problem with electricity if that's what's being used for cooking.
