What should a strata cleaning contract cover in NSW?

Everything in a strata cleaning contract turns on the distinction between common property and lot property. The owners corporation is responsible for maintaining common property, and the cleaning contract it engages services that property and nothing else.

The boundary is defined by the registered strata plan, not by intuition, and it is not always where people assume. Whether a courtyard, a balcony, a car space or an internal wall is common property or part of a lot depends on how the plan was drawn and on any by-laws granting exclusive use. Committees regularly get this wrong in both directions.

Get the boundary right before writing the scope, because it determines what the levy legitimately pays for. Cleaning inside a lot at the owners corporation expense is not a service, it is a misapplication of funds, and it creates a precedent that is difficult to withdraw.

Building footprint is a poor predictor of strata cleaning cost. What predicts it is the number of lots, because lots generate people, and people generate the traffic, waste and touch that cleaning addresses.

Lifts are the second driver. A lift is a small, heavily touched, constantly used space with mirrors and stainless steel that show every mark, and it is judged harshly by residents and by prospective buyers. Lift interiors need attention at a higher frequency than corridors.

Bin rooms are the third, and they are the most common source of complaint in NSW strata buildings. A bin room in a building with a high proportion of apartments and limited collection frequency is a demanding space: chute hoppers, floor washing, odour control and pest prevention. It is also the area most often under-scoped, because it is unpleasant and easy to leave vague.

Most NSW strata buildings run well on a two-tier structure: a frequent short attendance covering the high-visibility and hygiene-critical areas, and a less frequent longer attendance covering everything else.

The frequent attendance covers the lobby, lifts, ground floor entry, bin room and any amenity in use. The less frequent one carries the corridors, stairwells, car park and detail work. In a small building the frequent attendance might be twice a week; in a large one it is daily with a caretaker presence.

Bin day is worth scheduling around explicitly. In most NSW councils the bin room is at its worst immediately before collection and its best immediately after, and aligning an attendance to the day after collection produces a visibly better result for the same money.

In NSW, owners corporations generally operate an administrative fund for recurrent operating expenses and a capital works fund for major periodic and capital expenditure. Routine cleaning is an operating expense and belongs in the administrative fund.

Periodic works are less clear cut and committees should take advice rather than assume. A quarterly window clean is arguably recurrent; a full external facade clean once a decade may sit differently. The treatment should be consistent with how the owners corporation classifies comparable expenditure and with the accountant or strata manager advice.

What matters practically is that the budget reflects the real scope. Many strata budgets carry a cleaning line that has not been reviewed for years while the building has added residents, amenities or short-stay activity. If complaints about cleanliness are rising while the levy is flat, the levy is the problem, not the cleaner.

The recurring failure in strata cleaning is a scope written in adjectives. Keep the common areas clean and tidy is not a scope, it is an aspiration, and it produces exactly the disputes you would expect when a committee changes or a resident complains.

The second failure is invisible frequency. Residents see the result but not the schedule, so a contractor who reduces attendance is rarely detected until the standard has visibly dropped. A posted schedule in the lobby and a signed attendance record solve this cheaply and also reduce the volume of complaints, because residents can see when the next clean is due.

The third is the assumption that cleaning covers everything about the common property. It does not. Gutter clearing, pest control, grounds maintenance, graffiti removal, garden work and window cleaning above ground level are separate services with separate contractors and separate pricing. Committees regularly discover this after a storm.

Write the scope before seeking quotes, and issue the same scope to every contractor. Otherwise the committee receives three prices for three different jobs and has no basis to choose between them beyond the number.

Include an area schedule taken from the strata plan, a task list per area, a frequency matrix, the consumables arrangement, access and key handling requirements, and the exclusions. Ask each contractor to state the labour hours per attendance their price is built on. That single question converts an unreadable comparison into a straightforward one.

Check insurance and compliance before price. Public liability appropriate to the building, workers compensation, and the industrial instrument covering the staff. Ask about staffing continuity, because in a residential building a familiar cleaner is a genuine amenity and an unfamiliar one is a security concern raised at every general meeting.

On budget, Pro Clean Corp indicates a range of roughly $500 to $1,400 a month for a strata building of eight to twenty units, with general commercial work quoted at $35 to $50 per hour and ongoing contract work at $30 to $45 per hour. Use those as a sanity check on the quotes received rather than as a target.

A strata cleaning contract needs a feedback loop, because the committee is not on site daily and the strata manager is not either. Three cheap mechanisms cover it.

The first is an attendance record: a sheet in the bin room or an electronic log showing date, time and tasks completed. The second is a periodic joint inspection, ideally quarterly, walked by a committee member and the contractor supervisor together against the scope. The third is a defect reporting obligation, since the cleaner walks the whole building regularly and will see a failed light, a leaking tap or a damaged door closer well before anyone else reports it.

Review the contract annually against the current building profile rather than letting it roll over indefinitely. Buildings change: amenities get added, short-stay letting increases, waste collection frequency changes, a commercial lot changes use. A contract written for the building as it was five years ago is priced for a building that no longer exists.