An Office Can Allow Dogs Without Being Pet Friendly
- Allowing pets is simple. Preparing an office for people and animals to share the space is another story.
For several years now, pets have been gaining ground outside the home and have begun making their way into offices as well. Among them, dogs perhaps represent the most visible change. But allowing them into a building does not mean it is prepared to accommodate them. From the moment one crosses the threshold, that difference becomes apparent. A dog must pass through the lobby, share elevators, and spend hours in a space occupied by people and, potentially, other animals. It needs to drink water, go outside and come back in, while the routines of an office continue around it. And that coexistence requires addressing more than just access, from where the dog can stay to what happens if it barks, makes a mess, triggers an allergic reaction, or bothers someone working at the next desk.
In major cities such as Mexico City, the number of animals helps put into perspective what bringing that coexistence into the workplace entails. According to INEGI, the capital had about 4.55 million pets in 2025, including 2.37 million dogs. Against a population estimated by CONAPO at 9.18 million that same year, that amounts to roughly one dog for every four people.
Their presence in the office market, however, is much harder to measure. SiiLA reviewed a stratified random sample of 120 of the 608 buildings it monitors in Mexico City. In 15 cases, it found public evidence that pets were allowed, either at the coworking space in the property or in the building itself, depending on the stratum analyzed. In six others, it documented restrictions, while in 99 cases the available information was insufficient to determine a policy.
The absence of information does not mean those buildings prohibit pets. Still, it shows how difficult this feature is to identify in the office market, where, even when an identifiable policy exists, pet-friendly can mean different things depending on the property. At Metrópoli Patriotismo, for example, the rules allow pets in common areas, while each office retains the right to decide whether to allow them inside. At Yama Bosques Santa Fe, by contrast, the feature applies to the development itself, which includes an indoor “dog park” as an amenity. In other words, the policy can end where the office begins or extend to the building that houses it.
In that sense, the evidence was also not distributed evenly across office classes. In the sample, documented pet admission increased with building class, from 4.5% among Class B buildings to 11.3% among Class A properties and 17.8% among Class A+ properties. The difference was smaller between properties with and without coworking, at 15% and 10%, respectively. None of these results establish that building class or coworking explains whether pets are allowed, but they do identify where documented admission appeared more frequently within the sample.
Pet Friendly Beyond Access
Allowing pets into offices has implications for both the property and the people who work there. A study of 749 dog-owning employees found that those who frequently brought their dogs to work reported higher work engagement and quality of life than those who never did. On a scale of zero to six, the first measure reached 4.28 among frequent dog-bringers and 3.52 among those who never brought them, while quality of working life was 4.02 and 3.52, respectively. However, these results do not mean dogs caused those differences, as a subsequent review of the available evidence cautions that objective measures of their effects at work are still lacking.
Uncertainty about those effects does not, however, eliminate the practical needs that arise when people and animals share a workplace. The same review identifies concerns related to noise, hygiene, allergies, fear of animals, and distractions, and notes that a pet-friendly policy may also require pet-free areas, behavioral criteria, and rules that allow the space to be shared with people who prefer to keep their distance from animals. Evidence also suggests that without enough flexibility to care for the animal during the workday, the same policy can become an additional source of pressure for the person who brings it.
How those needs are addressed may also depend on the space itself. The same study of 749 workers found that people who frequently brought their dogs to work were more heavily represented in offices with one or two people and less represented in those with 11 to 20. The authors suggest that pet-friendly policies may therefore be easier to implement in small offices and note that factors such as the animal’s size and the office layout may also affect coexistence.
The line between a workplace policy and a real estate feature therefore becomes less clear, because allowing pets can be decided by a rule, but keeping them in an office throughout the workday requires determining how they move through the space, where they stay, and under what conditions they share it with others. And so, in an office, pet-friendly begins at the door, but what happens after crossing it determines how prepared the property is to accommodate them.
To analyze how office buildings are changing and the features that set them apart, visit SiiLA Market Analytics or email us at contacto@siila.com.mx.
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¹ SiiLA selected a stratified random sample of 120 buildings from the 608 office properties it monitors in Mexico City, using a reproducible seed (15092026). The sample included 60 of the 128 buildings with coworking space and 60 of the 480 without it, a disproportionate allocation designed to provide sufficient observations from both groups. The research was conducted through a review of publicly available information online and automated searches in Python, with the results subsequently verified manually. In the coworking stratum, the policy of the operator at each property was evaluated and not attributed to the building as a whole; in the non-coworking stratum, evidence specifically attributable to the property was required. A case was classified as “Yes” only when explicit evidence showed pets were allowed, and as “No” only when explicit evidence showed a restriction. Insufficient information was classified as “undetermined,” not as a prohibition. Because of the disproportionate allocation between strata, differences in the unit of evidence examined, and the high proportion of undetermined cases, the results describe only the public evidence identified in the sample and do not estimate the share of pet-friendly buildings among the 608 properties monitored by SiiLA.
