Most facilities teams compare landscaping companies on portfolio photos and quoted price, which are the two easiest things to evaluate and, honestly, some of the weaker predictors of how the relationship will actually go once a contract is signed. A few less visible factors matter more over a multi-year engagement.
Design-build-maintain continuity is one. A company that only designs, or only maintains, introduces a handoff where responsibility for problems gets disputed — a landscape architect can blame poor execution, a maintenance contractor can blame poor original design. A vendor that does all three under one roof has nowhere to point the finger, which tends to produce better outcomes on ambiguous problems.
Compliance and institutional experience matter more than most companies realise until they're mid-tender. SAP registration, tender experience, and structured HSSE governance aren't bureaucratic box-ticking — they're a reasonable proxy for whether a vendor can operate at the reporting and safety standard a corporate or regulated site actually requires, versus one used to smaller residential jobs.
Staffing model is worth asking about directly: are the people on-site directly employed by the vendor, or subcontracted through a layer you can't audit? Directly employed, trained crews with a named site supervisor are easier to hold accountable and tend to have better institutional knowledge of your specific site over time.
Finally, ask what reporting looks like before you need it, not after something goes wrong. A vendor that can show you a sample monthly report — growth tracking, issues found and resolved, upcoming work — is telling you they've done this at scale before. One that can't produce a sample is telling you something too.
