Warehouse & industrial · Melbourne
Crib rooms, amenities, change rooms, site offices and floors across Melbourne's northern industrial belt, plus the make good, handover and fit-out cleans that constant tenant movement keeps creating. Site induction completed before the first shift.
The real scope
Ask a warehouse manager what the cleaning problem is and almost nobody says the warehouse floor. They say the crib room, the toilets and the change room, because that is where their people eat, wash and get changed, and that is what generates the complaints.
So an industrial contract is mostly an amenities contract with a floor component attached, and pricing it as a floor area job produces a number that is meaningless in both directions. A 4,000 square metre facility with one crib room and two toilets is a small job. A 1,200 square metre workshop with twenty five tradespeople, a lunch room, two change rooms, showers and a site office is a much larger one.
We measure and count at the inspection: crib rooms, lunch rooms, toilets, urinals, basins, showers, lockers, site offices, and then the floor by surface type and by traffic. The quote shows each of those separately so you can see what you are paying for and what you could drop.
Floors
The most common way an industrial cleaning quote goes wrong is that one side is pricing a sweep and the other side is expecting a scrub.
Removes loose material: dust, packaging debris, pallet timber, strapping. Fast, cheap, and the right answer for a dry goods warehouse with light traffic. It does not remove tyre marks, ground in dust film or anything that has been walked into the concrete, and it will not make an old slab look clean.
A powered scrubber with water and detergent, lifting the film that sweeping leaves behind. Slower and more expensive, and the only thing that changes how a floor actually looks. Usually the right call as a periodic on a quarterly or half yearly cycle rather than every visit.
Pedestrian walkways, forklift aisles and hazard hatching stop doing their job when they are grey. Scrubbing those zones on a shorter cycle than the rest of the floor is cheap, visible, and the thing a WorkSafe inspector notices before anything else.
Dust on racking, beams, service pipes, light fittings and roller door tracks builds steadily and then arrives all at once, usually in a product complaint or an audit finding. It is periodic work, quoted per job, and it needs the aisle closed and often an elevated work platform, so it is scheduled into a shutdown rather than squeezed into a Tuesday night.
Where a site handles food, packaging or anything with a hygiene audit attached, high dusting stops being cosmetic. Whittlesea and the Campbellfield and Somerton belt carry a real concentration of food and beverage manufacturing, and those sites need the chemical register and the frequency documented rather than described.
Make good and fit-out
Melbourne's northern industrial precinct runs at about 7.7 per cent vacancy, the loosest in the city, with heavy take-up alongside it. In plain terms, tenants are moving constantly.
Every one of those moves creates cleaning that did not exist a month earlier. A make good clean when a lease ends and the tenant has to hand the building back in the condition the lease describes. A handover clean before keys change. A fit-out clean after the trades leave and before the new tenant's first pallet arrives. None of that work has an incumbent contractor attached to it, which is why it is the easiest industrial work in Melbourne to win and the hardest to plan for.
It is quoted at $74 an hour plus GST or as a fixed job price, and it is nearly always urgent, because it sits between a lease ending and a lease starting and neither date moves. Tell us the handover date first and we will tell you honestly whether we can hold it.
What it does not cover is repair. Damaged panels, worn line marking, failed lighting and floor cracking are a builder's job, and we will tell you which items on your make good schedule are not cleaning rather than quoting them and hoping.
Where
The northern industrial belt runs almost continuously from Campbellfield and Somerton through Thomastown and Epping to the Tullamarine and airport precinct. We are inside it rather than driving to it.
One of the densest light industrial estates in Melbourne. Warehousing, transport depots, trade suppliers and manufacturing along the Hume Highway and Sydney Road. Ten minutes from our base.
Established manufacturing and engineering workshops, warehousing and trade businesses on a tight street grid. Amenities heavy, early starts, and the thinnest competition of the eight suburbs we cover.
The markets, food logistics and the freight belt around them, plus Epping industrial. Overnight and pre-dawn operations that need a cleaning window most contractors will not staff.
Freight forwarders, logistics, aviation services and airport precinct facilities running around the clock. Cleaning has to fit the gaps in a 24 hour operation rather than the other way round.
The full Victorian rate card and the compliance package sit on commercial cleaning in Melbourne. Site offices and dispatch offices are quoted the way office cleaning in Melbourne is. Our Western Australian industrial pages are under warehouse cleaning in Perth, where the vacancy picture, and therefore the work, is close to the opposite of Melbourne's.
Questions
By counting the amenities, not by measuring the shed. Crib rooms, lunch rooms, toilets, urinals, basins, showers, lockers, change rooms and site offices carry almost all the labour hours in an industrial contract. Then the floor is priced separately by surface type, traffic and whether you want it swept, scrubbed or spot cleaned by zone. A 4,000 square metre facility with two toilets is a small job and a 1,200 square metre workshop with twenty five tradespeople is not.
Sweeping removes loose material. Scrubbing uses a powered machine with water and detergent to lift the ground in film that sweeping leaves behind, and it is the only thing that changes how the slab actually looks. Sweeping is usually the recurring task and scrubbing the periodic one, quarterly or half yearly. Quoting one and expecting the other is the most common disagreement in industrial cleaning, so we write which is which into the scope.
Yes, before the first shift rather than on it. Our cleaners work in hi-vis and site appropriate footwear, carry whatever additional personal protective equipment your site requires, and are briefed on forklift traffic, pedestrian routes and exclusion zones. We also supply safety data sheets for every chemical we bring on site so they can be added to your register.
Usually. We schedule attendance around dispatch, shift change or the quietest window on your roster, and where water is used near a traffic route we sign and cordon it. Sites running around the clock, which is common at Tullamarine and in the Epping food logistics belt, get a window that fits the operation. That may be overnight, which is quoted at $72 an hour plus GST because the award pays more for it.
Seventy four dollars an hour plus GST, or a fixed job price once we have seen it, which we prefer for anything with a hard handover date. Make good work sits between a lease ending and a lease starting, so it is nearly always urgent. Tell us the handover date first. If we cannot hold it we will say so rather than take the booking and let you find out in the last week.
No. A make good clean returns a building to the condition your lease describes as you leave it. A fit-out clean prepares a building you are moving into, after the trades have finished and before your first pallet arrives, and it deals with construction dust, adhesive residue, protective film and paint spatter. Both are priced per job at the same rate, and both are different work from your recurring contract.
Yes, as periodic work quoted per job. It needs the aisle closed and often an elevated work platform, so it is scheduled into a shutdown rather than squeezed into a weeknight. On food, beverage and packaging sites it stops being cosmetic and becomes an audit item, and those sites get the frequency and the chemical register documented rather than described.
Yes, named cleaners with a named backup. On an industrial site that matters more than in an office, because your supervisor needs to recognise the person on the floor, the person needs to know your traffic routes, and an induction is worth something only if it stays with the same people. Rotating unfamiliar contractors through a live warehouse is a safety problem before it is a cleaning problem.
Next step
We walk the amenities first and the floor second, because that is where the hours are. A written scope and three frequency options inside two business days.