THE new owners of a prominent city centre office block have revealed plans to refurbish the building and turn it into flats.

City Exchange, a seven storey building of former council offices on Hall Ings, was sold at a London property auction in July for £650,000. Now a planning application to create 66 one and two-bedroom apartments in the tower block has been submitted to Bradford Council.

Joseph Grunfield, from Salford based City Exchange Investments, submitted the plans, which say the building's exterior will be "radically altered."

The application also reveals the extent to which parts of the empty building have deteriorated since it became vacant.

The building, next to the NCP car park and opposite Bradford City Hall, was vacated in 2013 and had been marketed as office space since.

Earlier this year plans to convert the building into 161 flats were refused by the local authority over concerns of the size of the proposed flats.

Many of the dwellings on the floor plans for that application, by Anthony Lupton, had a floor space of just 16 square metres. Councillors also queried the inclusion of shared facilities between the flats, more common in student housing, before refusing them.

The new application has drastically reduced the number of flats proposed and many of the apartments will be two bedroom.

The application says: "The existing cladding system has come to the end of its functional life and is beginning to deteriorate, so this refurbishment programme will also improve the aesthetics of the existing elevations.

"Externally the existing building envelope will be radically altered."

It goes on to detail some of the issues with the existing building, including areas of "loose cracked tiles" that cover "seriously degraded soft and loose mortar. The mortar is damp and has moss and other vegetation growing in it.

"Loose tiles on the parapet are at significant risk of being dislodged in high winds."

Changes to the building include a new steel superstructure, new wall insulation, the creation of external terraces to some flats and new render and aluminium added to the walls.

A decision on the application will be made in October.

Meanwhile, plans for a different development of flats in the city centre have been expanded. Bradford Council has previously granted planning permission for the conversion of Arndale House on Broadway, opposite the Broadway shopping centre, into 98 one and two bedroom flats.

Now Cheshire based Pinnacle Alliance have submitted an application to alter the layout of the building to create 126, rather than 98 flats.

The flats will form part of a development called The Xchange, which will include a gym on the first floor, and shops and cafes on the ground floor.