For most of the last century, commercial office buildings competed on the same three things: location, floor plate efficiency, incentives, and rental rate. The building itself was mostly a container — a stack of desks and meeting rooms distinguished only by address and price.
Landlords marketed the tenancy schedule. Tenants bought the square metres.
That era is over. Accelerated by lockdowns in 2020, occupiers now have unprecedented choice and hybrid work has made the daily commute optional for most knowledge workers. Managers are discovering that the building itself has to be worth coming into to attract the best talent and run cohesive teams.
But it’s not the bottomless macha and ping pong tables that drags them in. Turns out, the surrounding community to the building itself can be as important as what goes inside, and the data backs this up.
Studies from the Urban Land Institute, and others, show amenity-rich offices in stand-alone locations only slightly outperform standard offices in the same locations. Offices however, in true mixed-use neighborhoods with access to good cafe’s, bars, and public transport, outperform similar assets by over 30%.
For serious landlords, capturing that premium is the new frontier.
What placemaking actually means
Placemaking is a term borrowed from urban planning. In its original form it describes the deliberate creation of public spaces that attract people: laneways, markets, waterfronts, town squares. Applied to commercial real estate, it describes the deliberate effort to make a building or precinct a destination that people ‘choose’ rather than simply occupy.
In practice, that means curating experience within and around the asset: ground-floor hospitality, activated lobbies, event programming, public art, gardens, wellness facilities, and flexible spaces that serve different users at different times of day. It means treating the building as a neighbourhood within a neighbourhood, not as a standalone product.
Why it matters now
Hybrid work is no longer the trend to watch. It’s the baseline. JLL’s 2024 Global Occupancy Planning Benchmarking Report found 87% of organisations globally operate with a formal hybrid program – across 85 organisations and nearly 58 million square metres of space. At year-end 2025, 97% of Fortune 100 companies require employees to attend the office on at least a hybrid basis, with fully flexible arrangements now exceptionally rare among major employers.
The strategic implication for landlords is direct. If employees are in the office 2–3 days a week rather than 5, those days have to be worth the commute. A beige floor plate with fluorescent lighting and a vending machine isn’t going to clear that bar. The value proposition of the office has shifted from “the place where your work happens” to “the place that earns the commute.” Placemaking is the operational discipline that clears that new bar.
The numbers behind the shift
The strongest data comes from JLL’s research on “lifestyle office markets” – mixed-use districts that integrate office, residential, retail, hospitality, and public space. Published in September 2025, the findings reframe the amenity conversation entirely:
- Office properties in lifestyle office markets command a 32% rent premium over comparable Class A office space.
- They lease up twice as fast — 90% leased in two years versus four years for traditional Class A developments.
- They maintain materially lower vacancy: 12.5% versus 22.5% for the broader office market.
- Office occupancy in vibrant urban-edge districts is up 24.8% since 2019, compared to a 7.5% decline in other CBD office space over the same period.
- Institutional capital allocation to lifestyle office markets has grown from near-zero pre-2015 to more than 8% of institutional office acquisition volume in 2024 — a clear signal that this is now an investable asset category, not an aesthetic preference.
At the individual project level, adaptive-reuse placemaking projects have generated some of the strongest office returns in the post-pandemic cycle. ROW DTLA in Los Angeles — a 30-acre industrial-to-mixed-use conversion — turned a $357 million acquisition into a development valued at $718 million, with office leases commanding 25% rent premiums over market averages since 2014 (RIOS/JLL analysis, 2025).
The inconvenient finding: amenities alone don’t work
What the data also shows — and what most landlords investing in placemaking have yet to internalise — is that individual amenities, in isolation, deliver surprisingly small premiums:
- Full-service fitness centres with locker rooms and showers: ~3% rent premium over non-amenitised peers.
- Food halls: 1.4% premium. Regular food service: 0.1% (essentially nothing).
- Basic fitness centres without differentiated offering: 0.5%.
- LEED certification: 3% premium.
These numbers are from JLL’s own highly amenitised buildings dataset (those with 10+ tagged amenities and at least one differentiated offering). The outdoor terraces and courtyards generated the strongest single-amenity premiums, but even those were in the mid single digits.
The implication is important. The 32% lifestyle-market premium is not the sum of a series of 3% amenity premiums. It’s the compounding effect of integration – of a building that functions as part of a genuine mixed-use district, programmed and managed as a single experience, rather than a Class A tower with a gym and a café stapled onto the ground floor.
The distinction matters because it explains why so many amenity retrofits disappoint relative to the capital spent. The ping-pong table was never the point. Neither was the rooftop terrace in isolation. The point is the coherent experience of a place that people choose to be in.
The role of flex workspace in placemaking
Flexible workspace is one of the most effective placemaking tools available to landlords – and one of the most underused for this specific purpose.
A well-managed flex floor brings foot traffic, diversity of use, and daily energy into a building that would otherwise operate on the rhythm of its largest single tenant. It creates a natural gathering point for events, networking, and community activity. It provides an entry point for smaller tenants — individuals, startups, small teams — who would never consider taking conventional lease space in the building, but who collectively generate the activity that makes the asset feel alive.
When flex workspace is combined with ground-floor F&B, wellness facilities, and curated programming, the effect is compounding. Flex members use the café. Café foot traffic makes event programming viable. Events draw external visitors who discover the flex offering. The building starts functioning as a micro-precinct — a place with identifiable culture and rhythm, distinct from the generic office towers around it.
This is also why the research consistently shows that buildings with flex workspace operating well achieve higher overall rental premiums than those without. The flex component isn’t just a revenue line; it’s an activation engine for the rest of the asset.
What doing it well actually requires
Effective placemaking in commercial real estate requires the following elements to be successful:
Intentional design — spaces designed to invite different activities at different times of day, not just “amenities” dropped into leftover floor area.
Sustained programming – a calendar of events and activations that gives people reasons to be in the building beyond their immediate work. A single launch event is marketing. A sustained program is placemaking.
Dedicated community and hospitality management – people whose actual job is to facilitate connections, welcome visitors, and maintain the atmosphere. Without this layer, physical infrastructure sits underused.
Placemaking is an operational commitment that compounds over time, five to ten years. As community deepens, reputation grows, and the building becomes known as somewhere people want to be rather than somewhere they have to be. Bryant Park in New York is the textbook case: a $500 million public investment that added $1.4 billion in adjacent real estate value over the decade following completion.
For lifestyle premiums to attach to office assets, landlords must actively participate in precinct-scale placemaking — sometimes in partnership with adjacent owners, sometimes with local government, sometimes with specialist operators who can run the activation layer professionally.
The competitive ground
The office market has bifurcated. CBRE, JLL, and Cushman & Wakefield research from 2024 onwards all converge on the same finding: top-tier, amenity-rich, well-located office buildings are leasing near record rents, while lower-grade and unactivated space is struggling with elevated vacancy.
For buildings in the latter, placemaking strategies can be the difference between an empty or thriving asset. For landlords with assets in the right locations but the wrong experience, the renewal cycle coming over the next three to five years is the moment the decision gets made. A building that can be repositioned as a destination will participate in the premium; the one’s that can’t will continue to drift with below market rents and high vacancy.
Sources and further reading
– JLL, Lifestyle Office Markets Defy Broader Office Market Challenges, September 2025
– JLL, 2024 Global Occupancy Planning Benchmarking Report
– JLL, 2024 Building Amenities Outlook and Highly Amenitized Buildings* research
– JLL, Global Design Perspectives 2026
– JLL, Three Amenities Owners Are Adding to Office Buildings, 2025
– RIOS, The Value of Placemaking in Urban Development (ROW DTLA case study), 2025
– Urban Land Institute, *Creative Placemaking research series
– Propmodo, In a Turbulent Office Market, Placemaking Matters More Than Ever
– Smart Cities Dive, The Economic Benefits of Great Public Places (Bryant Park case study)
– World Property Journal, U.S. Office Buildings with Upscale Tenant Amenities Still Enjoy Premium Rents in 2024
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This is part of an ongoing series on the operational and financial dynamics of flexible workspace and commercial real estate. For placemaking strategy and flex-led activation work on commercial assets, reach out.
