The 2027 Office Amenity Checklist: The Building Technology Tenants Now Expect Before They Sign

7 minute read | Updated September 15, 2026

Leasing teams are hearing the same thing on tours. The finishes matter, the location matters, but the questions that decide a signing now increasingly land on how the building actually works: how a guest finds the office, whether the phone works in the garage, where someone parks an EV. The amenity conversation has moved from the gym and the coffee bar into the building's technology, and the expectation is set before a prospect ever reaches your leasing sheet. This checklist sits inside the broader shift toward connected building technology.

This is a checklist you can copy straight into your own positioning document. It is organized the way a tenant experiences a building, in journey order, not by product category. Third-party occupier research backs the direction of travel here: CBRE's 2026 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights points to experience and infrastructure quality as differentiators in the competitive set, not afterthoughts.

Use it two ways. As a leasing tool, it is the language a prospect is already using. As an ownership tool, it is a repositioning brief: the gap between where your asset sits today and where the competitive set is heading.

The 2027 Office Amenity Checklist

Eight items, in the order a tenant meets them, from the front door outward.

1. A visitor gets from the front door to the right door without asking anyone

The first impression a tenant's client forms of your building happens in the lobby, before anyone shakes a hand. A guest who can locate a firm, confirm the floor, and route themselves to the correct elevator bank, unassisted, reads as a building that runs itself. A guest who stands in the lobby looking for someone to ask reads the other way.

What tenants now expect is a lobby that answers the question for them: a searchable directory and clear wayfinding that get a first-time visitor to the right door on the right floor. For leasing, this is the single most visible technology on a tour because the tour itself starts in that lobby. It also carries a real accessibility obligation. A directory and wayfinding interface that meets ADA reach, contrast and interaction requirements is not a nice-to-have in an office asset; it is part of the base spec, and it belongs in the checklist as such. ITS has built directories and wayfinding as the anchor of the lobby experience for 27 years. For a deeper read, see the arrival experience in detail, and note that keeping the tenant data behind the directory current is its own discipline.

2. Your guest is expected before they arrive

A step up from finding the office is being awaited at it. When a tenant can pre-register a visitor and that guest is greeted by name, issued a credential, and cleared into the building without a queue, the arrival feels intentional. It also ties into the building's access control rather than sitting beside it, which matters in any asset with turnstiles, elevator dispatch or secured floors.

For premium and institutional buildings this is table stakes. ITS's visitor experience integrates with major access-control platforms, including Genetec, C-CURE 9000, AMAG and Kastle, and the same approach is proven in higher-security environments, including courthouse and medical office building installs where the arrival has to be both smooth and controlled. The security side of the arrival is covered in visitor management and access control.

3. Anyone can see which shared space is free right now

As tenants take less space and share more of it, the shared amenity floor, the conference center, the bookable focus rooms all become part of what they are leasing. The expectation is simple to state and surprisingly often unmet: anyone should be able to see which shared space is available right now, and reserve it, without hunting for a person or a spreadsheet.

Room and space displays at the point of use turn a shared floor into a functioning amenity rather than a photographed one. On a tour, a live availability screen outside a bookable room signals that the shared space actually works day to day, which is exactly the doubt a prospect has about shared amenities.

4. People can check their train time on the way out

The building experience does not end at the turnstile. In transit-served markets, a real-time departures display near the exit, showing the next trains and buses, is a small amenity that people notice every single day on the way out. It is one of the quietest differentiators on this list and one of the easiest to demonstrate on a tour, and ITS has a long installed base in transit environments specifically.

5. The building has an app, and it does something useful

A tenant experience app is now an expected line item in Class A positioning. The important word is useful. An app that does nothing but display a newsletter is a liability; one that lets an occupant book a room, register a guest, report an issue and access the building on their phone earns its place. The established platforms here are the tenant-experience specialists, and if you are positioning a premium asset, a prospect will ask what the app does. This item is not something ITS provides, and it belongs on the list precisely because the checklist should describe the market, not any one vendor. What matters for your positioning is that the app connects to the building's actual systems rather than living as a separate silo.

6. Cell service works everywhere, including the garage and the stairwell

In-building cellular coverage is infrastructure, not decoration, and it is felt daily. Dead service in a garage, a stairwell or a core corridor is the kind of defect a prospect experiences within minutes of a tour and remembers. A distributed antenna system or equivalent in-building coverage solution is increasingly assumed in Class A space, and its absence is one of the few amenities a tenant can test on the spot. This is not an ITS product; it is a base-building question worth raising early in any repositioning.

7. There's somewhere to charge the car

EV charging has moved from perk to expectation in most metros, and the tenant question has shifted from whether charging exists to how much and how it is managed. For ownership this is a capital and utility-planning item with its own budget line, and often its own incentive path. It is outside ITS's line, and it earns its place on any honest 2027 list.

8. There's somewhere to shower and leave a bike

End-of-trip facilities, secure bike storage, showers, and lockers support the commute patterns tenants now plan around. They are a straightforward differentiator in wellness-oriented positioning and, like EV charging and connectivity, they sit outside ITS's line. Their presence rounds out a checklist that describes what tenants actually want rather than what any single vendor happens to sell.

How to read this list against your own building

Four of these eight items converge in one place: the lobby. Directory and wayfinding, visitor arrival, shared-space visibility, and transit information all live in the first and last spaces a tenant and their guests move through. That concentration is not an accident of this list; it is why the lobby carries so much of the first impression on a tour. Concentrating attention there is often the highest-leverage move in a repositioning because it is the most visible and the most shared. A reader who accepts the list usually wants to know what to buy first and how to fund it, which is exactly what sequencing and funding a lobby technology program answers.

The items outside ITS's line, the app, connectivity, EV charging, end-of-trip, are just as real and belong to different budget lines and, often, different decision-makers. A complete positioning brief accounts for all of them. Where ITS can help is the cluster that lives in the lobby, and how it sequences against everything else, including where AI and systems integration fit.

Talk to ITS Before Your Next Tour

Tell us which building you are positioning and we will map this checklist against what is already in the lobby. Start the conversation.