Today we welcome a new column and columnist to RENX: Strathmore president Jessica Milligan will focus on outside operations at a range of commercial real estate property types with her Building Operations: The Outside Edge.

In a mandate-driven return-to-office environment, experience still differentiates. Employers may require presence, but buildings influence whether that presence feels like compliance or choice.

That judgment begins before tenants reach the lobby. It starts on the approach.

Yet many portfolios still treat the exterior as a maintenance line item rather than what it actually is: part of the workplace experience that signals care, credibility and readiness for people to return. 

That's where the quiet rise of pollinator landscapes across Canadian institutional portfolios gets interesting.

We're discussing this on Earth Day, which is somewhat symbolic. But what might read, at first glance, like a sustainability gesture is doing something more strategic. Pollinator gardens are becoming one of the most visible, lowest-cost, highest-leverage tenant engagement tools available to commercial real estate – and the operators treating them as such are pulling ahead. 

Why now 

Three pressures are converging.

Tenant expectations have shifted post-pandemic; employees want workplaces that feel alive, not just accessible. Institutional owners are under pressure to show ESG ambition that survives contact with operations, not just ESG that looks good in a report. And climate volatility is forcing landscape strategy to do more – manage stormwater, reduce salt and chemical loads, hold up against heat. 

Pollinator landscapes sit at the intersection of all three. They're biodiversity work you can see. They're programming you can point to. They're regenerative site strategy that lowers input costs over time.

And they put life – movement, colour, sound – into the parts of a property most people only notice when something is wrong. 

What happened in Toronto 

The clearest evidence that this moves past symbolism comes out of a pilot Colliers ran at three of its Toronto office properties. The intervention was straightforward: convert underused outdoor space into pollinator gardens, then program them – a guided walk through the gardens, a pesto-making demo using herbs grown on site, honey tastings using honey from the properties' own hives. 

The survey results give asset managers a rare, clean read on what the exterior can do for a building. 

Of the tenants who attended, 81 per cent rated the events five stars and 94 per cent said they wanted to attend again.  Ninety-one per cent felt more positive about their employer afterward, and 94 per cent said the pollinator gardens signalled that their employer cares. 

Fifty-nine per cent said nature-rich grounds built pride and connection. 

Most relevant to any portfolio operator tracking the return-to-office question: 50 per cent said the experience made them more motivated to come into the office.

That last number is the one to sit with. Landlords across the country are spending meaningful capital on lobby renovations, food programs and event spaces to move the RTO needle. 

A re-landscaped outdoor zone and three programmed afternoons moved it for half the tenants who showed up. 

Where most installations fail 

The Toronto results are instructive for another reason: they show what happens when a pollinator garden is treated as a program, not a project.

Pollinator gardens are easy to plant. They're hard to sustain.

The industry is dotted with year-one showpieces that became year-two liabilities – meadows overtaken by invasive species, beds mowed on the same schedule as the turf, signage that faded before it was photographed, and not a single tenant event to justify the capital outlay. 

The failure mode is almost always the same. The install was a project; the care was a commodity.

The design thought about biodiversity; the maintenance contract thought about head count per acre.

Pollinator planting requires a different operating model – seasonal timing that honours the bloom cycle, crews trained to recognize what to leave standing, documentation that tracks species establishment over multiple seasons, and programming that gives tenants a reason to use the space rather than walk past it. 

Scaling across portfolios 

For multi-site owners, the harder problem is consistency.

A pollinator zone at one asset is an anecdote. Pollinator standards across a national portfolio are a positioning statement – one that surfaces in ESG disclosures, leasing decks and renewal conversations.

It requires thinking about landscape operations the way the best portfolio operators already think about hospitality and wellness: as an operating layer, not a line item. Standardized specifications, consistent documentation and an operating partner capable of delivering the same outcome in Halifax, the GTA, and Calgary — with crews who understand the intent, not just the scope. 

The takeaway 

Healthy sites are resilient sites, and resilient sites lease.

The Toronto data makes the argument in numbers most asset managers rarely get from a landscape line: half of tenants more motivated to commute in, nine in 10 feeling better about their employer, nearly all of them asking to do it again.

Pollinator landscapes are tenant engagement infrastructure. Treat them that way and they will earn their place in the operating budget several times over. 

The owners already doing this aren't planting for an ESG report. They're planting for renewals.