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Hold onto your sweats and slippers while you can. You may be logging off Zoom and trekking into work sooner than you think. That’s according to Liz Hart, president of leasing at real estate adviser Newmark, who predicted a nationwide return-to-office trend on Fox Business this past Tuesday.
According to Hart, 70 percent of U.S. tenants currently looking for new offices are seeking the same size or larger spaces, suggesting a move to grow and welcome employees back in person.
One executive publicly pushing for a return to in-person work is JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) CEO Jamie Dimon. He cites younger staffers’ diminishing social lives as a key factor.
“I’m not making fun of Zoom, but younger people are being left behind,” he said recently in a panel discussion at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia. “If you look back at your careers, you learned a little bit from the apprentice system. You were with other people who took you on a sales call or told you how to handle a mistake or something like that. It doesn’t happen when you’re in a basement on Zoom.”
It’s not the first time Dimon has called for a return-to-office. At the start of 2024, 2,000 JPMC employees signed a petition in support of the hybrid model. They said a full, five-day return to office would be financially straining and a “great leap backward” for the company.
Despite last year’s petition, Hart doesn’t think backlash to an in-office mandate should be an issue. “We have to start with purpose and with trust and going back to why are you coming to the office?” she says. “It’s because you’re wanting to solve a problem and it’s because you’re really excited about the work that you’re doing. I think when we’re seeing companies that really have something that they’re excited to solve for, we’re seeing a great return-to-office.”
She says she agrees with Dimon’s assessment that people solve problems more efficiently in person, especially in the age of AI and the new types of challenges it poses. In fact, she says 60 percent of tenants in the technology sector are looking to grow their office spaces.
The trend doesn’t just apply to older companies—new companies are also wanting to grow their in-person employee count. Hart says the data includes three- and four-year-old companies with real estate requirements of over 100 square feet.
“This is not the kind of growth that we’ve seen in the market for the past five years, so it’s quite encouraging to see these new companies that are coming up, mostly in the artificial intelligence sector,” Hart says.
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Ava Levinson
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