To get a feel for the importance of the perks offered at JPMorgan Chase’s future Manhattan headquarters, take a look at the bank’s job postings at its $3 billion office development.
The New York City-based financial giant is hiring for private chefs, event coordinators, bakers and waitstaff to help support a lineup of eateries, including an Irish pub, several coffee bars and a food hall with Michelin-starred restaurant concepts.
The perks for the supertall tower at 270 Park Ave. go beyond the gastronomic. Interior lighting has been designed to replicate workers' circadian rhythms — becoming brighter or dimmer or even changing colors throughout the day. The building can track employees' coffee preferences so future meetings are personally stocked. And a signature scent is being developed for the 60-story high-rise to put its olfactory stamp on the New York office market.
It's an investment aimed at anchoring JPMorgan's staunch commitment to in-person work, as corporate tenants across the country prioritize the nicest and newest properties for their post-pandemic office space.
With a growing pool of employers requiring people to spend more time in the office, premium space is a tool many have leveraged to help ease the shift away from pandemic-era levels of flexibility. The stakes, and the quality of the amenities, are rising, helping to boost leasing across the country's largest office markets such as New York City and San Francisco as a flurry of tenants scramble to claim a dwindling amount of space in the highest-end buildings.
For JPMorgan, instead of leasing, it's simply building its own high-end headquarters.
The company is putting the finishing touches on the 2.5 million-square-foot skyscraper before it makes its official debut later this year with a roster of perks that could raise the bar for developers in other markets looking to set their properties apart to compete for tenants.
Now hiring
Along with roles for its more traditional banking business lines, JPMorgan has filled positions for nutritionists and so-called well-being performance coaches, or individuals who can provide stress management and other wellness techniques for employees.
The building will also have what David Arena, JPMorgan's head of global real estate, has described as a food court that will be "a modern version of an Eataly."
"That's the job of our group in real estate: Take the friction out of your day and make your day easier," Arena told Fortune in an interview this year.
Licensed healthcare providers will work out of the tower's new Health & Wellness center to offer sick visits, acute care, general medical advice, lab work, allergy shot management and international travel preparation.
These perks showcase how high the bar for premium office space has climbed in the years since the pandemic's 2020 outbreak.
While developers remain hesitant and financially constrained from breaking ground on new office developments, a number have opted instead to try to emulate the top-tier amenity package that will be found at JPMorgan's tower in order to stay ahead of competing properties.
Changing Manhattan office market
That has especially been the case in Manhattan, a market that has led the national office market recovery and is quickly running out of top-tier options for prospective tenants.
"Demand is increasing to levels we haven't seen in the post-pandemic era, and supply levels are dropping," Danny Mangru, Avison Young's national office lead for market intelligence, told CoStar News.
The JPMorgan headquarters building is an example of a redevelopment, rather than new construction, as the office rebound takes off, according to Mangru.
"That has all started here in New York but is now spreading across the United States," he added.
JPMorgan is expecting to house more than 14,000 employees at its new Foster + Partners-designed headquarters. The opening could be the trigger the market needs to get more luxury construction projects off the ground, some brokers say.
Leasing across Manhattan in the first half of the year has already blown past totals reported across the same period in the years leading up to the global health crisis.
Tenants collectively signed on for more than 16 million square feet between January and June of 2025, compared with about 15 million each year between 2016 and 2019, according to CoStar data.
Office availability in Manhattan has fallen to about 90 million square feet, according to the data, the first year it has dipped below 100 million since 2020.