What Amenities Do Office Tenants Actually Want in 2026?

Ask ten office landlords what tenants want and you will get ten amenity brochures back: a fitness centre, a rooftop terrace, a tenant lounge, a golf simulator. Ask the brokers who actually closed the leases and the answer is duller, cheaper, and far more useful.

Here is what the data says, and what it means specifically for an office building in Etobicoke or suburban Toronto.

The Toronto market just raised the stakes

Toronto is carrying the national office recovery. In Q1 2026 the city recorded 1.9 million sq. ft. of net absorption and its downtown vacancy rate fell to 14.4%, down from 18.3% a year earlier, against a national downtown rate of 18.2%, according to CBRE. Vacancy in trophy buildings dropped below 10.0% for the first time since 2020.

That last number is the one that should interest a suburban landlord. The best space is filling up. CBRE notes that with no meaningful new supply on the horizon beyond 2026, tenant demand is expected to trickle down to the next-best product tiers.

Translation: your building is next in line. The question is whether it is ready when the tenant walks through it.

What is actually in the buildings where deals get signed

Cushman & Wakefield built the most useful dataset on this. Rather than survey tenants about preferences, they catalogued 27 distinct amenities across the 50 largest office leases signed in a single year, then looked at what those buildings had in common.

Five amenities appeared in more than 80% of them: controlled access, on-site retail and food, fibre availability, public transit within two blocks, and on-site parking. Eighty-six percent of the buildings analyzed had some mix of retail and food on site.

The glamour amenities came further down: on-site fitness in 72%, outdoor space in 70%, showers and lockers in 64%, bike storage in 60%. Useful, but not the common denominator.

Suburban buildings have a problem the downtown towers do not

Cushman & Wakefield found that demand for amenities is essentially identical whether the tenant is signing downtown or in the suburbs — roughly 13 to 14 amenities per building in both cases. What is not identical is the ability to satisfy that demand by walking out the front door.

The average Walk Score of the downtown buildings in the study was 93. The suburban average was 46.

Anyone who has worked in the Islington-City Centre or Airport Corporate Centre corridors knows the pattern. Employees drive in. Lunch means moving the car, losing a parking spot, and burning twenty minutes. So most people skip it — or they order delivery and the lobby becomes a staging area at noon.

That is the single largest amenity gap in suburban Toronto office space, and it is the one landlords are least likely to have on their capital plan.

The food-and-beverage answer has changed

The default assumption is that closing a food gap means recruiting a café tenant. For a 60,000 sq. ft. suburban building, that math rarely works: a café needs a build-out, an operator willing to sign, and enough daily foot traffic to survive a hybrid-schedule Monday and Friday.

Cushman & Wakefield's own read is that food amenities are becoming, in their words, "more personalized, instantaneous and convenient" — and they name on-site micro markets explicitly alongside pop-up services and delivery as where that demand is going.

The familiar reference point is a vending machine in the corner of a lunchroom. A managed micro market is a different product entirely: an open, glass-front smart store with a real assortment, tap-to-pay checkout, restocking on a data-driven schedule, and an operator accountable for it. The spending data reflects the difference. Cantaloupe's 2025 Micropayment Trends Report, drawn from millions of 2024 transactions, found consumers spent roughly 27% more per transaction at micro markets and 101% more at smart stores than at traditional food and beverage vending machines. Micro market sales crossed $1 billion for the first time, and 96% of those transactions were cashless.

The honest part: no single amenity wins a lease

Cushman & Wakefield are direct about this, and so are we. Amenities are not the solution — they are one input. The buildings in the study averaged 14 amenities each. No one of them changed the building's narrative on its own.

So the right question is not "which amenity wins," it is "which gaps are cheapest to close." Ranked that way, the list reorders quickly.

What we would tell an Etobicoke office landlord

Start by scoring your building against the five amenities that showed up in more than 80% of the buildings where leases got signed. Controlled access and fibre are non-negotiable; if either is weak, that is your first cheque.

Then look honestly at food. If there is nothing a tenant's employees can walk to in ten minutes, you have the most visible gap in the building and, fortunately, the cheapest one to close. A managed micro market from The Merchant Group™ carries no capital cost, no operating cost, and no staff burden for the property. We install it, stock it, service it, and support the people using it.

We bring 30 years of retail experience — Walmart, Staples, and Starbucks — to how that assortment is built. A building full of trades and shift workers does not want the same shelf as a floor of software developers, and a generic planogram serves neither. Snacks, drinks, and everyday essentials, chosen for the tenants actually in your building.

Office tenants in 2026 are not asking for a golf simulator. They are asking whether their people can get through a Tuesday without leaving the building. That is a much easier question to answer well.