JLL CEO Christian Ulbrich: The Office Is 'Core' Again

JLL raised its profit guidance in July after posting 11% revenue growth across the business and a 21% jump in revenue from advisory property services. The commercial real estate giant now sits at position 175 on the Fortune 500, up from 188 a year earlier, and its share price hit a high of $393 in August, compared with a five-year low of $123 in 2023.

The numbers back a conviction CEO Christian Ulbrich holds firmly: the office is back, and it should stay that way.

"From a plain efficiency point of view, and if we generalize, it's clearly more efficient to have people in the office than if they work from home," Ulbrich said in an interview at JLL's new offices in the City of London. "The benefit which you gain from people interacting, communicating, sharing best practice, sharing ideas is massive—outweighing the cost of the office space. Therefore, to have people coming to an office is, for almost all companies, beneficial."

Ulbrich's argument is not purely commercial, though JLL, as one of the world's largest property firms, clearly has skin in the game. He grounds it in two formative experiences separated by a generation.

His first job placed him in a pod of five desks, right next to his boss. "I could consistently learn by just observing him, overhearing his conversations, asking him quick questions, and so my learning experience was fantastic," he said. "It would have never been possible if I had worked from home."

His son's first job was different. It came during the COVID-19 pandemic, and for the first 15 months he worked largely remotely. "He was working from home, and he was devastated," Ulbrich said. "The ability to learn for him was minimized."

That contrast shapes Ulbrich's view that proximity matters at every level of an organization, not just for executives worried about productivity among bedroom-bound staff.

"I strongly believe that it is beneficial for the majority of co-workers," he said. "We have moved into a world where what you learned at university is probably three years later more or less obsolete. We're in that [era] now of lifelong learning. You need your co-workers to continue learning, and how can you do that? You can do that in an office."

He stops short of demanding a five-day commute. JLL itself practices what he calls flexibility, with room for occasional days at home when there is a reason. "But the core place for work is the office," he said. "The basic principle is they have to come to the office."

The setting for the conversation underscores another plank of his argument: if companies want people back at desks, the desks had better be worth the trip. JLL's new London offices, in the company's original home and the site of its first "shop" in 1783, are built largely from recycled building materials and furniture, with almost no separate offices—Ulbrich counts "one corner office" across the three floors.

"It has to be absolutely state of the art with regards to sustainability," he said of modern office design. "It has to be in a very professional location, and it has to be really good architecture—which is a lot of light and terraces and all the elements which would make our colleagues feel comfortable."

Though JLL is now headquartered in Chicago, Ulbrich, who is German, gives the edge to London as the world's leading business hub—whatever New Yorkers might claim.

"London is the global hub because it's the city which is able to attract everybody," he said. "They all like to come to London, whereas some people would be hesitant to come to New York, and other people will be hesitant to come to China. Everybody is coming to London."

He acknowledged the bias risk with a laugh: "It's always dangerous to ask a European about these things because if you ask an American, they will talk about New York, and maybe if you ask a Chinese [person], they will talk about Shanghai or Hong Kong, and then others about Singapore."

For corporate occupiers and the property industry alike, the signal from JLL's results is hard to ignore: the companies betting hardest on the office are seeing the returns show up in their own numbers.