What JPMorgan’s New HQ Can Teach Landlords About Workplace Demand

• Give ‘em what they want: JPMorgan’s demand-driven headquarters shows why landlords must embrace flexibility to meet changing workplace expectations.

• Not created equal: The U.S. office market is showing signs of recovery, but most metros are still stuck with high vacancy and rent pressures.

• Come on down: Canadian investors are still pouring money into U.S. real estate despite heightened political tensions.

• Smart building trends webinar: Smart buildings are evolving as AI and connected systems redefine how properties think, adapt, and perform. Sign up

Flash Poll

Presented by Spacebase

Master Lease Accounting with Confidence

Simplify complex lease calculations with Spacebase’s free amortization schedule template. Built by accountants, for finance teams managing real estate and equipment leases.

Office

What JPMorgan’s New HQ Can Teach Landlords About Workplace Demand

The office market hasn’t fully healed, but it has stopped drifting. Attendance data, mobility tracking, and employer signals all point in the same direction: people are coming back more often, and the era of waiting to see what happens is over. The real question now is what kind of office workers will willingly return to.

JPMorgan Chase’s new Manhattan headquarters is becoming the industry’s unofficial case study for that shift. Long before steel went up, the bank asked something most landlords still don’t: what do our employees actually want from a workplace? The answer came from one of the largest employee-experience datasets ever collected.

That demand-driven approach flips the traditional playbook and exposes a broader truth. The bottleneck isn’t uncertainty about return-to-office—it’s the outdated assumptions baked into much of office design itself. Flexibility, segmentation, and real-time feedback are emerging as the new rules for a market finally ready to evolve.

Overheard

The Office Comeback That’s Skipping Over Much of America

The office market’s recovery is starting to show up in the numbers, but only a handful of cities can actually feel it. In places with strong job centers and a deep bench of corporate tenants, leasing momentum is finally picking up. Elsewhere, vacant floors and half-empty towers remain the norm. The divide is growing more visible as companies consolidate into higher-quality buildings and leave older stock behind.

Much of this imbalance comes from how unevenly remote work reshaped cities. Some markets adapted quickly, leaning into mixed-use districts and improving transit access. Others were left with aging buildings, shrinking tax bases, and commuter patterns that never fully returned. Even landlords with well-located assets are navigating an environment where lease terms are shorter and tenant improvement demands are higher, making every deal feel more delicate than it once did.

For the real estate industry, this split suggests the next phase of office strategy will be highly local. The cities with early signs of recovery may attract more capital and more development interest, reinforcing their momentum. The rest will need to rethink what their central business districts are for. Office space is no longer an automatic anchor for urban economics, and markets that wait for demand to “snap back” could find themselves waiting a long time.

Canadians Keep Buying Into America’s Housing Market Despite Political Chill

A new report shows that Canadians are still flocking to U.S. real estate, even as political tensions dominate the headlines. Buying activity has climbed back to its highest level in nearly a decade, driven by stronger cash-flow potential, friendlier mortgage products like fixed-rate and DSCR loans, and the appeal of holding assets in U.S. dollars. The article frames the trend as a contrast to the icy diplomatic mood, highlighting that investment behavior is moving in the opposite direction of the political rhetoric.

This continued cross-border buying comes with context. Canadians have long been one of the most active foreign buyer groups in the U.S., pulled south by lower housing prices, more flexible financing, and investor-friendly laws in many states. Even as tariffs and immigration friction escalate, the financial incentives remain powerful, especially for investors coming from cities where affordability has evaporated and cash-on-cash returns have compressed.

For the U.S. real estate industry, the persistence of Canadian capital signals that fundamentals still matter more than geopolitics. Sustained interest from Canada could help support demand in Sun Belt and Midwest markets that rely on foreign buyers to balance seasonal or investor-driven cycles. But it also comes with a cautionary edge: if political tensions intensify or currency dynamics shift, that flow could cool quickly, leaving certain markets exposed to a pullback they’ve grown accustomed to not worrying about.

Are You Enjoying This Newsletter?

Propmodo Daily is written and edited by Franco Faraudo with contributions from readers like you and the Propmodo team.

📧 Forward it to a friend and suggest they check it out.

🔗 Share a link to this post on social media.

🗣 Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Share your feedback and tips at [email protected] or connect with us on X through @propmodo.

✅ Not subscribed yet? Sign up for this newsletter here.

📫️ Please add our newsletter email, [email protected], to your contacts to make sure you don’t miss any updates.

Enjoy reading about trends and innovation in commercial real estate? Subscribe to Propmodo.com for unrestricted access to reliable, data-driven journalism and exclusive insights available only to subscribers.