Samantha Martz, her resume replete with roles at some of the world's largest tech companies, has set her sights on helping those businesses develop office space strategies for an uncertain real estate future.

"We are at a really pivotal time when companies are redefining what the office means and what the office looks like," said Martz, who joined JLL in May as executive vice president of its High-Growth Technology group in San Francisco. "A decade ago it was the Google model of having yoga and free food and keeping employees there as much as possible. It's a totally different environment now."

In her new role, she'll be focused on office property consulting, strategy development and negotiation with clients ranging from venture-backed startups to major tech giants. Before joining JLL, she worked at Salesforce, WeWork and Gensler and said her time at those places put her in a unique position to think about real estate strategies clients should adopt to support both employees and their own long-term growth.

Martz has been to the tech-real estate dance before. She came out of the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in economics in 2008, just as a generation of Bay Area startups such as Uber, Airbnb and Stripe were in their infancy, and watched as they came to dominate the local real estate market.

Martz got her start doing workplace strategy with architecture firm Gensler, helping tech companies think about how their offices could play a role in attracting and retaining talent. She joined Salesforce as a global real estate strategist "right at that hockey stick moment" when growth took a sharp upward turn at the tech company. While there, she helped manage its worldwide portfolio of more than 2 million square feet of office space and was involved in the development and leasing of the iconic Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

Through it all, Martz said, her interest in the intersection of location selection, architecture, amenities and design grew. "You can make such a statement with your real estate and office."

"I was able to learn how office design really impacts culture," she said. "That was an issue and hot topic 10, even 15 years ago, but it's even more prevalent today. Employees have moved everywhere, and the definition of the workplace will change a lot over the next year to two years."

It was her experience as WeWork's director of broker development, however, that put her in the best spot to understand the biggest issue tech companies are weighing in adapting their real estate strategy moving forward: flexibility.

Companies across the country have implemented some version of a permanent remote or hybrid work policy. With employees asked to come in only a few days of the week — if at all — the office market has been slower to recover in cities that previously relied on the tech giants' voracious appetite for more space.

As a working mom of two young children, Martz knows firsthand how valuable a flexible working environment can be for an employee, especially throughout the pandemic when daycare centers sporadically shut down and school closures meant parents had to juggle multiple roles.

"Being flexible and nimble will be about asking questions about when employees do come together and what they're coming together for," Martz said. "As we transition and things become more flexible with more employees spread out, I am a firm believer in the notion that there's nothing to replace that in-person connection."

As companies move through what she describes as a "trial-and-error period," Martz will focus on working with a roster of tech clients balancing their workplace needs against challenges including the competition these days for good job candidates and a slowdown in venture capital funding. She said she'll be able to leverage JLL's reputation for having one of the strongest tenant representation teams in the San Francisco Bay Area, and will guide tech clients on how to balance the increasingly flexible landscape with a need to retain a presence in a physical office environment.

It all comes down to figuring out what the new real estate equation is for high-growth tech companies, if there is one at all.

"Real estate is a people game, so the question now is about how to use real estate as a tool for companies to best support their employees," Martz said. "Everyone wanted flexibility before the pandemic, and now, most employees want to be in the office at least some of the time. It will be tailored to having employees more spread out, but for the most part, it will be the same issue of using space to build company culture and camaraderie."