Jan Levinson

Jan requires two things above all others: an upscale, private life that broadcasts total control, and a comfortable distance from Michael Scott. Both are extremely achievable in Atlanta. The control, admittedly, is more of an aspiration than a guarantee.

Jan Levinson is a study in the gap between the image and the reality, and placing her means honoring both. The image is airtight: a sharp, ambitious corporate executive with expensive taste and an iron grip on her own narrative. The reality, which the show revealed slowly and mercilessly, is a woman whose career, finances, and stability all came apart while she insisted, with white knuckle intensity, that everything was fine. What Jan wants from a neighborhood is the image. Sophisticated, private, upscale, professional, a place whose very address says she has it together. Whether she does is not our department. Our job is to find her the perfect facade, and Atlanta has a great one.

Who we’re working with

Jan was Michael’s boss and then, catastrophically, his girlfriend, a former VP of Sales whose downward slide took her from the corner office to a candle business called Serenity by Jan, run out of a home that was slowly falling apart. She’s a single mother to her daughter Astrid, conceived via sperm donor in one of her more decisive moments, and she is Type A to the point of instability, driven by a need for control, success, and independence that curdles under pressure. She is, in short, complicated, and she’d want that word said with respect.

Her housing profile is pure aspirational Jan. A modern luxury condo, upscale, professional, private. Her deal breakers are chain stores, because she has taste, and proximity to Michael Scott, because she has memories. Her budget is $500,000 to $700,000, annotated, poignantly, as the budget she had before the bankruptcy, a reminder that Jan’s relationship with money is as volatile as everything else about her. She wants the sleek, private, sophisticated life, and she wants it far from the man who represents her worst decade.

The match: Buckhead

Jan belongs in Buckhead, the one part of Atlanta that runs on exactly the polished, upscale, private energy she’s trying to project.

Buckhead is affluent, professional, and image conscious in the specific way Jan needs, a place of luxury condo towers, valet service, upscale everything, and a general atmosphere of people who have arrived and would like you to notice quietly. For Jan, this is armor. A sophisticated Buckhead high rise condo is the physical embodiment of the self she’s always performing: controlled, successful, private, above it all. She can close the door on a discreet, elegant space, and for as long as she’s inside it, the facade and the reality are the same thing. It’s the most Jan environment in the metro.

The budget fits the fantasy, at least the version from before the bankruptcy. Her $500,000 to $700,000 buys a genuinely nice luxury condo in Buckhead, no chain store in sight, and, crucially, it puts a reassuring stretch of city between her and Clarkston, where Michael is busy narrating his own life to a rotating cast of new neighbors. Jan gets her private, upscale sanctuary and her buffer zone from the past, all in the one neighborhood built to make a person feel like they’re winning. Whether Jan is actually in control of anything is, as ever, a separate and delicate question. But the address will insist that she is, and for Jan, the insisting has always been the point.

The alternatives

Sandy Springs. Upscale, professional, and private, with plenty of sophisticated condo living and an easy remove from the chaos. A very solid second that loses only on prestige. Jan wants Buckhead’s specific cachet.

Brookhaven. Upscale and polished, but it skews younger and more social than Jan’s guarded, private ideal. She’d find it nice and slightly beneath her, which is Jan’s resting state about most things.

Dunwoody. Established and affluent, but a touch corporate suburban for a woman who fancies herself an intown sophisticate. Jan wants to feel like she’s at the center of something glamorous, and Dunwoody is comfortable rather than glamorous.

The verdict

Jan buys a sleek luxury condo in Buckhead, closes the door on a beautifully controlled private space, and lives at a satisfying distance from Michael Scott and every chain store in the metro.

She’s the character whose match is most about the story she needs to tell herself, and Buckhead tells it flawlessly. Sophisticated, successful, private, in control. The neighborhood delivers every bit of that image, holds it up like a mirror, and asks no hard questions about what’s underneath. For Jan Levinson, that is exactly the arrangement she’s always wanted with the world, and in Buckhead, at least architecturally, she finally gets it.

Holly Flax is next, and Holly is the warmest, kindest person on this entire list, which is why she somehow ended up with Michael.