Strata & common property · Perth
Lobbies, lifts, stairwells, car parks and bin bays, on a fixed monthly price with one point of contact and a written report you can forward to the council of owners without rewriting it first.
Who this is for
A strata manager does not lie awake about lobby floors. They lie awake about the owner who emails every fortnight, the committee meeting where somebody asks what the cleaning line item is for, and the contractor who does not answer the phone.
So this page is not really about mops. It is about whether you can answer an owner in one reply, whether you have a document to attach, and whether the person you call actually picks up. Every scheme we clean gets a written scope, one point of contact and a scored monthly report, which between them close off most of the complaints before they are raised. The underlying method is the same one behind all our commercial cleaning in Perth.
Scope
Common property has a boundary and it matters. Everything below is common property in most schemes. Anything on the lot side of the boundary is the owner's, and we write that into the scope so nobody is quietly cleaning inside a lot for free.
Entry glass and door furniture, intercom panel, letterbox bank and the floor beneath it, mats lifted and cleaned under, seating, hard floors mopped, cobwebs to reachable height. The first fifteen seconds of the building, and the part every prospective tenant judges.
Car interior including walls, handrails, mirrors and stainless, button panels disinfected, and the door tracks, which are the detail almost every contractor skips and the one owners photograph. Lift lobbies on each level cleaned to the same standard as the ground floor.
Handrails and balustrades, stair treads and landings, corridor floors, skirtings, light fittings and diffusers on a periodic cycle, fire door faces, and rubbish removed. Stairwells collect the things people leave behind, and a fortnightly clean that ignores them is where complaints begin.
Bay floor swept and washed, bin exteriors and lids, surrounding walls, drains checked, and bin rotation to and from the kerb where the scheme needs it, with the day and the responsibility named. Periodic bay washing is $180 per bay plus GST.
Swept, litter removed, cobwebs to reachable height, stairwell and lift access points, and oil spot treatment where required. Machine sweeping and pressure cleaning are periodic work at $4.50 per square metre with a $350 minimum, quoted separately and scheduled with notice to residents.
Common washrooms, gym or pool surrounds, BBQ areas, garden furniture and shared laundries where the scheme has them. Internal window and glass cleaning is $6 per pane, and external ground floor glass is $9 per pane.
Reporting
Most of the friction in a cleaning contract is administrative, not operational. If you have to chase a contractor for a certificate the week before an annual general meeting, the cleaning could be excellent and the relationship will still be bad.
You get one person to call, not a call centre and not a different subcontractor each quarter. Certificates of currency are issued with the proposal and again at renewal without being asked for. Invoicing is monthly in arrears on 14 day terms, one invoice per scheme so it matches the levy account it is paid from.
A scored inspection, area by area, dated and signed, sent to you rather than held in a portal you have to log into. Anything below standard is rectified within 48 hours at our cost and shows on the following report as closed out.
Working with a committee
A council of owners is several people with different standards and no shared document. The fastest way to end a recurring dispute is to write down what was agreed and price it.
When an owner says the stairwell is never done, the scope says the stairwell is done fortnightly and the report says it was done on the fourteenth. That either resolves the complaint or turns it into a useful conversation about whether fortnightly is enough, which is a decision with a price attached rather than an argument. If the committee wants weekly, we quote weekly. If they want to reduce frequency to hold the levy, we will tell you honestly which areas will show it first.
Strata managers and property managers are usually asked for a cleaner at the end of a tenancy too. Our end of lease cleaning carries a seven day re-clean guarantee, which is the part that matters when you are the one signing off the final inspection, and regular house cleaning in Perth is priced from a published table you can send to a tenant without a quote request.
Schemes with a commercial ground floor often need a second scope for the tenancies themselves, which is office cleaning, and buildings in the eastern corridor are covered from ten to fifteen minutes away: see Belmont and Bayswater.
Questions
Lobbies, lifts and lift tracks, stairwells, corridors, letterbox areas, glass, common washrooms, bin bays and car parks, with rubbish removal and bin rotation where the scheme needs it. Frequency is usually weekly or fortnightly, and periodic pressure cleaning and bin bay washing are quoted separately so the monthly figure stays stable.
Yes. A written monthly quality inspection goes to the manager, scored area by area. It is the document you need when an owner asks what the levy is buying, and it is written so it can be forwarded to the council of owners without being rewritten.
No. Thirty days notice either way after a three month establishment period. A scheme should not be stuck with a contractor because of a term the committee inherited from a previous manager.
Twenty million dollars public liability with a care, custody and control extension, and workers compensation for every cleaner. Certificates of currency are issued with the proposal and reissued at renewal, which saves you asking for them the week before an annual general meeting.
Bin bay washing is $180 per bay. Bin rotation to and from the kerb is written into the recurring scope where the scheme needs it, with the day and the responsibility stated. Illegally dumped hard rubbish is quoted as it arises, because pretending it is predictable is how a fixed price becomes a dispute.
Yes, and it usually helps. Schemes that sit on the same run cost us less to service, and that shows up in the pricing. Each scheme still gets its own scope, its own monthly report and its own invoice, because the levies are separate and the paperwork has to match that.
Our other city
Marlow also works across Melbourne's northern suburbs from a base in Broadmeadows. The equivalent page there is owners corporation cleaning in Melbourne. It is priced separately, because Victorian on-costs are not Western Australian ones: Victoria carries a higher workers compensation rate for cleaning and a portable long service benefits levy that Western Australia does not have.
Next step
Send us the address and the number of lots and we will inspect the common property, write the scope and price it. Multiple schemes can be quoted together.