JPMorgan Chase said to eye employee move to Brooklyn

JPMorgan Chase is rumored to be planning the relocation of 2,000 employees to its Brooklyn MetroTech office by the end of 2014.

The majority of the moved workers will come from the bank’s 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza office, a 60-story building that sold to Shanghai-based Fosun International last year. The move comes as JPMorgan makes a larger effort to downsize and consolidate its real estate.

“Were they to come, it would be a validation of our office market here,” Tucker Reed, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, told Bloomberg of the rumored move. “The only drawback, if you can call it that, would be the challenge it creates. It makes our space dilemma a little more acute, but that’s a good problem to have.”

JPMorgan owns two buildings at the 3.7 million-square-foot campus — 4 Metrotech Center and 3 Metrotech Center — and in 2012 began listing around 70,000 square feet of its space there for rent, an unnamed source told Bloomberg.

JPMorgan owns two buildings at the 3.7 million-square-foot campus — 4 Metrotech Center and 3 Metrotech Center — and in 2012 began listing around 70,000 square feet of its space there for rent, an unnamed source told Bloomberg. The complex has drawn technology and media companies recently, including 3D printing firm MakerBot and ImpreMedia, which publishes New York’s El Diario La Prensa. [Crain’s] — Julie Strickland