“We love the project,” says developer Peter Palandjian of Waterplace Park towers in downtown Providence. “It’s just no one is buying.”

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The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

Boston developer Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. is considering converting one of the two condominium high rises in Providence’s Waterplace Park that are scheduled to open in the spring into rental apartments until the real-estate market improves.

“We’re looking at alternatives, which may include renting one of the two [towers] for a year or two,” Intercontinental’s chairman and chief executive officer Peter Palandjian said in an interview last week. “We love the project. We love the building. … It’s just no one is buying.”

Only 14 of the 193 units in the two towers are under purchase-and-sales agreements, he said, and the building is scheduled to be completed in three or four months.

A decision will probably be made early next month, Palandjian said, and the building would be “ready for a spring rent up.”

The Waterplace Park towers — which contain 193 units — were the first and the biggest of three condo developments in downtown Providence when the developer broke ground in May 2005.

Since then, the real-estate market has slowed to a crawl and the inventory of unsold condominiums has climbed. It would take nearly 12 months to sell all of the 1,816 condos on the market as of the end of October — almost double the six-month supply two years earlier, according to data from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors.

In Boston, three major condo developments have recently hung “For Rent” signs, including the Mezzo Design Lofts in Charlestown backed by a former Los Angeles Lakers basketball giant Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Canyon-Johnson Fund.

“Mezzo Design Lofts has opted to move forward as a rental community,” reads its Web site, “and is currently not going to offer any of their units for sale as condominiums.”

Condo-to-rental conversions are increasingly common in tattered real-estate markets in Florida and California, although less so in this part of the country, said Boston real-estate analyst Mark Hickey, of Property & Portfolio Research.

“We call it repartment,” he said, referring to the transition of some apartments to condo units and back to apartments.

The condo-to-rental conversions are harder to do in cities such as Boston, Hickey said, because the average high-end condo unit coming on the market is 2,000 to 3,000 square feet, compared with about 1,000 square feet for an average apartment. “You can’t split them in half,” he said, “if you’ve already gone into construction.”

In Providence, the Waterplace Park towers range in size from 750 to 2,500 square feet. At the time the developers broke ground, the units were slated to be priced at $300,000 to more than $1 million.

Unlike some developers that have construction loans which they must begin repaying once a project is completed, Waterplace Park’s developer has no “debt guillotine” hanging over it, Palandjian said.

“We can afford to be patient,” he said. “We could sit tight and not sell for three years.”

But with only eight units in one building and six in the other under purchase agreements, there are a lot of empty condos. And empty condos mean there is less money coming in to pay expenses such as insurance and utilities.

At the time of the groundbreaking in May 2005, the Waterplace condo project was hailed as part of the “phenomenal rebirth of American cities” which would draw empty-nesters fed up with cutting the grass and driving to the store.

Last spring, Intercontinental’s director of development and construction, Nicholas J. Iselin, said that he was dogging rumors about its two condo high rises at Waterplace Park.

“We’ve heard the rumor that we’re going to do a condo tower and an apartment tower,” he said last May, “but that’s not true.”

larditi@projo.com