Do abandoned buildings count as broken rooms for the purposes of downtime rules?

Question

To clarify the question let us assume a group of adventurers found a trade post that has been infested with undead for a decade and cleared the place of undead. If they decide that rather than looting the place they want to get it operational would the rooms contained in the trade post count as broken (providing half their usual capital gain and requiring half their cost to rebuild) or are there other rules for recovering abandoned buildings?

Answer 1

Probably not, but renovations may still be needed

The Downtime rules for Broken Rooms state:

Broken Rooms: If a room takes damage in excess of half its hit points (or is otherwise rendered sufficiently damaged by a downtime event or at the GM’s discretion), it gains the broken condition. A room with the broken condition generates half the normal income. In general, repairing a broken room requires spending an amount of gp or other capital equal to half the price of constructing the room from scratch. Certain building events may have alternative prices for repairing rooms with the broken condition.

"Damage in excess of half its hit points": This depends on how much structural damage the room has received. There are no details on how many hit points typical rooms have, so you would need to apply judgement to this, for example applying the object damage rules to all the structural elements (floor, walls, ceiling) and furniture inventory. Since stone walls have massively more hit points than any furniture, I think that purely based on hit points it would be unlikely that the room formally counts as broken if in a stone building, even if the zombies smashed most of the furniture.

"Otherwise sufficiently damaged": It is up to you do decide what counts as "otherwise sufficiently damaged". Obviously, without working furniture, you could not run an inn or trade post, so you could still demand that the PCs first pay for or spend time on cleaning up, renovations and new furniture, before it can generate the normal income. The game however does not provide any price lists for common dungeon fittings and furniture (as far as I can tell), maybe because this level of mundane accounting is deemed beyond the pale of what would be of interest. You could simplify this by declaring the rooms as "broken" and asking for the same level of investment to abstract that.

Answer 2

It depends on the amount of damage

A room counts as intact until there is damage that impacts its functionality. Think about a room with the furniture stacked at the side and covered in a tarp, waiting to be uncovered and re-set up.

A room that is broken still has useful functionality left. Think of a bar without chairs and tables, but the counter is intact. Neither cozy, nor seating, but at least there are drinks.

A room that is beyond broken and stripped for its parts is best modeled as not existing at all for downtime rules. Re-building it costs the whole cost, and they don't earn anything.