Commercial cleaning · Malaga
One of Perth's largest light industrial estates, and the building type here is consistent: office at the front, showroom or counter in the middle, warehouse behind. Three scopes on one contract.
Local
Malaga is about twelve kilometres from South Guildford, roughly fifteen minutes. It is also where two of our suppliers are, so a Malaga run is part of our week regardless of whether there is a site to clean that day.
Briskleen Supplies on Mulgul Road is the Western Australian distributor for the chemical range we use, and Commercial Cleaning Equipment on Stanford Way, four hundred metres away, is where the machines are hired and serviced. That is not a marketing detail, it is an operational one. If a Malaga site needs a scrubber for a periodic job, the machine is picked up in the same suburb. If a dispenser fails, the replacement is a five minute detour.
Malaga is also one of the more competitive suburbs in this market, because at least one established Perth cleaning contractor is headquartered in the estate. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What we compete on is set out on the commercial cleaning in Perth page: a written scope, fixed monthly pricing, a documented compliance package and no lock-in term.
The suburb
Malaga is unusual in that most of it is one building type repeated several hundred times. That makes it straightforward to quote accurately and easy to quote lazily.
The standard Malaga tenancy: a small office at the front, a trade counter or showroom behind it, and a warehouse or workshop at the rear with a roller door to a shared hardstand. Usually 200 to 800 square metres in total, with the office a small fraction of it and most of the cleaning hours.
Customer facing space with hard floors, glass, display racking and a counter. Cleaned every visit because it is what a customer sees, with floors machine cleaned on a periodic cycle rather than mopped into a haze.
Larger units with racking, pick faces and a dispatch area. Crib rooms, change rooms and amenities are the recurring scope, and the floor is periodic machine work. The detail is on our warehouse cleaning page.
Engineering, joinery, sheet metal and automotive service premises. Heavier soil, degreasing, dust control and a hard boundary between the workshop and the office, enforced by colour coded equipment that never crosses it.
A smaller share of the estate is pure office tenancy, often first floor above a unit. Standard office cleaning scope, cleaned after 6pm, with consumables supplied if you would rather not manage them.
Where several units share a driveway, bin area and visitor parking, the common areas are usually the owners corporation's responsibility rather than any one tenant's, and are quoted under strata cleaning with a monthly written report.
Method
The lazy way to quote a Malaga unit is to take the total floor area, apply a rate per square metre and send a number. It produces a figure that is too high for the warehouse and too low for the office, and it falls apart the first time somebody counts the hours.
The office is measured the way any office is measured: workstations at 45 to 60 an hour, washrooms at six to eight minutes per pan and basin set, kitchen at twelve to twenty minutes, glass entries, and floors at the production rate for the surface. The counter or showroom is measured on floor area, glass and customer facing surfaces, and cleaned every visit regardless of what the rest of the scope does. The warehouse is measured on its amenities, because that is where the labour is, with floors handled as periodic work.
Add the three and you have a defensible number with a scope behind it. It also means you can change one part without renegotiating the whole contract: drop the warehouse to fortnightly, keep the office at three times a week, and the quote adjusts by a line rather than by a guess.
| Area | Measured on |
|---|---|
| Front office | Workstations, kitchen, washrooms, glass |
| Counter or showroom | Floor area, glass, customer surfaces |
| Warehouse | Crib room, change room, amenities |
| Warehouse floor | Periodic machine scrub, per m² |
| High level | Periodic high dusting, per hour |
| Hardstand | Periodic pressure clean, per m² |
Periodic rates: floor scrub $0.65 per square metre, minimum $450. High dusting $72 an hour. Pressure cleaning $4.50 per square metre, minimum $350. Internal glass $6 a pane.
Cost
$58 an hour plus GST during the day, $64 after 6pm, $68 for periodic and one-off work, $78 Saturday. Minimum contract $650 plus GST a month, and no travel charge.
Most Malaga units land between one and three visits a week. A unit with four or five office staff and a warehouse crew of a dozen usually needs the office and counter twice a week and the amenities more often than that, which is the opposite of what people expect when they first ask for a quote.
Consumables are supplied at cost plus 20 per cent if you want them. In this estate that is a genuinely useful offer rather than a line item, because the wholesalers are here and we are already collecting from them.
Malaga runs with Bayswater, Morley and Bennett Springs, and connects across to Midland on the same northern corridor.
Questions
Most weeks. Two of our main suppliers are in the estate, so a Malaga run happens whether or not there is a site to clean that day. It is about twelve kilometres from South Guildford, roughly fifteen minutes, and it is inside the core area with no travel charge.
$58 an hour plus GST during the day, $64 after 6pm, $68 for periodic and one-off work. Minimum contract $650 plus GST a month. On a trade unit the more useful figure is the split: the office and counter hours are calculated separately from the warehouse amenities, and adding them gives a number that holds up.
As three scopes on one contract. The office is measured on workstations, kitchen, washrooms and glass. The showroom or counter is measured on floors, glass and customer facing surfaces, and is usually cleaned every visit. The warehouse is measured on the crib room, change room and amenities, not on floor area. Averaging one rate across the whole tenancy produces a number that is too high for the warehouse and too low for the office.
No. Thirty days notice either way after a three month establishment period. It is written into the proposal, and in an estate where businesses talk to each other it is not a term we would want to be defending.
Yes, at $0.65 per square metre with a $450 minimum, using a walk behind or ride-on scrubber. It is periodic work rather than part of the weekly visit, usually quarterly or six monthly depending on traffic, and it can be amortised across the year so the monthly invoice does not jump.
Yes, at cost plus 20 per cent. In Malaga that is genuinely easy for us because the wholesalers are in the same estate, so a dispenser failure or a run of hand towel is a short detour rather than a next week problem.
Next step
We are in Malaga most weeks anyway. Tell us the unit number and we will walk the office, the counter and the warehouse, then price the three parts separately.