Predicting building age from urban form at large scale

•Assessing generalizability of age prediction across cities and countries based on urban form.•Evaluating amount of local data needed to fill data gaps.•Detailed analysis of predictive performance across regions, construction periods, settlement and buildings types.•Assessing the usability of predictions to improve prioritization of large-scale retrofits.•Highlighting climate relevance of scalable, spatially explicit building attribute prediction.