By Franco Faraudo- Editor, Propmodo
Nov. 18, 2025
The office market has been trying to find its footing for years, but the tone is finally shifting. Swipe data, mobility tracking, and earnings calls all point to the same trend: people are coming back to the office more often, and the companies with the biggest footprints are leading the way. That doesn’t mean the market has recovered—it means the experimentation phase is over. The question is no longer whether office will come back, but what kind of office workers want to come back to. No project embodies that shift more than JPMorgan Chase’s much-discussed new Manhattan headquarters, a building that has become part case study, part Rorschach test for the entire industry. The steel and glass get most of the attention, but the real innovation happened long before construction, when the bank asked a simple question: what do our employees actually want from their workplace?
To get answers, JPMorgan didn’t rely on comps, surveys of rival buildings, or the usual amenity benchmarking that drives much of office development. Instead, they partnered with Leesman, a workplace research firm known for collecting some of the largest datasets on employee experience in the world. The firm, now part of HqO, helped the bank survey tens of thousands of workers, mapping how team behaviors, job functions, and even personality types intersect with physical space. The message from leadership was clear: design the building around demand, not supply.
“JPMorgan didn’t look at the supply, what other landlords were offering, they surveyed their employees and looked at the demand,” says Chase Garbarino, Founder of HqO.
That approach stands in stark contrast to how most landlords still operate. The standard playbook is to walk competing buildings, identify what amenities are trending, and then replicate as much of it as the budget allows. “The change that needs to happen is that landlords need to listen more rather than just look at the rest of the market,” Garbarino said. The result is a market full of spaces that look different on paper but function almost exactly the same. A rigid mindset about what an office should look like and what amenities it should have might be the real bottleneck, not return-to-office uncertainty.
Listening is easier when you know exactly who you’re listening to, which is why corporate occupiers have a natural advantage. Landlords, meanwhile, often don’t know who their eventual tenant will be when they start a redesign. That’s where Garbarino believes the industry needs to borrow a page from hospitality, not commercial leasing. “Landlords need to segment the market just like hotels. They need to know who they are catering to in order to make sure that they build what works best for them, even if it means that other segments might not find it as attractive,” he says.
If there is a universal design strategy emerging from this moment, it’s flexibility. Tenant mixes are shifting, lease terms are shortening, and amenity trends now move at internet speed. Today’s must-have feature can be tomorrow’s punchline. “A few years ago, everyone was putting in golf simulators, now it is pickleball courts,” Garbarino said. “The most used amenity in Manhattan right now is actually sleep pods.” The same cycle has played out for cubicles, private offices, collaboration zones, and quiet rooms. Entire floor plates have been built around trends that barely lasted a lease cycle.
This is where technology—specifically tenant-experience platforms—has become a quiet but powerful force. Tech that occupiers actually use can give landlords direct feedback loops they’ve never had before, allowing them to track actual employee behavior, test new programs, and gauge sentiment in real time. Space can still be expensive to build, but it no longer has to be static. The software layer can adapt far faster than the physical layer, helping owners evolve amenities, programming, and service levels even when walls stay put. In a market still searching for clarity, the ability to stay flexible may be the only durable strategy.
By Franco Faraudo, Editor, Propmodo
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Franco Faraudo has an MBA in entrepreneurship and has worked with a wide spectrum of technology and real estate organizations on their branding and content strategy. He has worked in real estate as an agent, manager, and investor. He writes about the intersection between the physical and digital world and is Co-founder and Editor of Propmodo.
