Lease-end cleaning for Sydney office tenancies, scoped against what your lease and your ingoing condition report actually require rather than a generic checklist. Carpet, walls, ceilings, kitchen, bathrooms and strip-out debris — documented so the handback conversation is short.
Make good cleaning returns a Sydney office tenancy to the condition your lease requires: full dust removal top-down, carpet extraction or floor treatment, walls, kitchen and bathrooms, and clearance of strip-out debris, documented against the ingoing condition report. Pro Clean Corp quotes one-off work at $40 to $50 per hour as a fixed price. We do not offer a deposit-release guarantee — that decision is the landlord's, across the whole make good obligation.
Make good is a contractual obligation, not a service description. Somewhere in your lease is a clause setting out the condition in which the premises must be returned at expiry, and the wording of that clause decides everything that follows. Some leases require return in the condition recorded at commencement, fair wear and tear excepted. Some require removal of all tenant works and reinstatement to base building or warm shell. Some name specific items — ceiling tiles, floor coverings, partition removal, patch and paint, signage, cabling.
The distinction matters because tenants routinely book a cleaning contractor for an obligation that is half builder work. Removing partitions, patching plasterboard, repainting, reinstating ceiling grid and capping services are trade works. Cleaning is the last step and often the smallest line in the budget. Where an item on your make good schedule is not cleaning, we tell you that rather than quoting around it.
Read the clause early. The single most expensive mistake Sydney tenants make is discovering a reinstatement obligation six weeks before expiry, when every trade in the market is booked and the landlord has leverage. If your tenancy is a warehouse or industrial unit rather than an office, the equivalent scope is covered under warehouse make good.
The ingoing condition report is the document that settles arguments, and its photographs are worth more than its text. Before we quote, we want to see it. It tells us the floor finish and its state at commencement, whether walls were freshly painted or already marked, what fixtures were present, and what the amenities looked like. Cleaning to that baseline is a defensible position; cleaning to somebody's idea of clean is not.
Where no ingoing report exists — which happens more often than it should, particularly on tenancies that have rolled over several times — the position is weaker for both sides, and the practical answer is to document the outgoing condition thoroughly and present it proactively. We photograph the tenancy after completion, room by room, dated, and hand that pack over with the invoice.
What we will not do is tell you that a clean will fix something that is not a cleaning problem. Impact damage to plasterboard, scratched glazing, burnt or torn carpet, holes from a partition line, adhesive scarring on a painted wall — those are repairs. Being told that early lets you price the repair rather than paying for a clean that leaves the item exactly where it was.
Floors. Commercial carpet responds well to hot water extraction and usually recovers further than tenants expect, particularly under desk zones where compaction rather than staining is the problem. Vinyl and hard floors are stripped and resealed where the lease or the condition report justifies it. Polished concrete is treated to the finish it had, not to whatever produces the most shine. Detailed floor treatment is run by our office carpet cleaning team where extraction is the main scope.
Walls and ceilings. Spot cleaning of scuffs and marks, full wash where the paint finish allows it, cleaning of skirtings, architraves and door faces, and removal of adhesive, hooks and wall-mount residue where it will come off without damaging the paint. Ceiling grid wiped, diffusers and vents cleaned, and marked or damaged tiles identified for replacement rather than scrubbed.
Kitchen and bathrooms. The two areas landlords and agents look at first. Kitchenette cabinetry inside and out, sink and tapware descaled, splashback, and appliance interiors including the fridge, dishwasher and microwave — a fridge left with product in it will be raised at handback every time. Bathrooms fully descaled: pans, urinals, basins, tapware, mirrors, partitions, floor and floor waste, with grout given a treatment rather than a mop.
If a strip-out contractor has removed your fitout, the space they leave behind is a construction site rather than an office. Substrate is exposed, fixings and anchors are still in floors and walls, dust from demolition has gone everywhere including the ceiling void, and there is invariably a pile of material nobody claimed. Cleaning that space is a post-construction job and it should be scoped as one.
Our scope behind a strip-out covers debris clearance and segregation into your bin arrangement, top-down dust removal with HEPA-filtered equipment, floor treatment on whatever substrate has been left, and detail work on glass, frames, services, amenities and hardware. Abandoned furniture, cabling and e-waste are separated for the right disposal stream rather than tipped into a general bin, and anything we suspect is asbestos-containing is left in place and reported rather than moved.
Sequence the clean against strip-out completion, not against lease expiry. A clean booked for the last day of the lease and delivered while a demolition crew is still on site achieves nothing, and it is the most common scheduling failure we see in Sydney make goods.
Work backwards from the handback inspection, not forwards from today. The sequence that works is: vacate and remove furniture, IT and cabling; strip-out and reinstatement trades; make good clean; joint inspection with the agent; any rectification. Each of those needs its own window, and the clean cannot compress to absorb delays in the ones before it.
Two to three weeks notice is comfortable for a straightforward tenancy, and more is better for large floors, for tenancies with a strip-out, and for anything landing between mid-December and late January when the whole Sydney market moves at once. Leave a buffer of a few days between the clean and the inspection so anything raised can be dealt with before the agent walks it, rather than after.
If you are moving into a new tenancy at the same time, it is worth quoting both together — the incoming side is covered by office fitout cleaning and running one contractor across both saves a round of site inductions and access arrangements.
Make good cleans are one-off project work, quoted as a fixed price built from a crew-hours estimate against your tenancy. Pro Clean Corp publishes one-off cleaning at $40 to $50 per hour, and the fixed price we give you is that rate applied to a scope we have walked rather than a figure per square metre — area alone is a poor predictor when one tenancy is open plan with a single kitchenette and another has fifteen offices, three meeting rooms and two bathrooms.
The items that move the price are carpet area and its condition, whether hard floors need strip and seal, the number of amenities and kitchenettes, how much wall washing the paint finish will tolerate, whether there is strip-out debris to clear, and building access including dock and lift bookings and after-hours permits. Tell us about all of them up front and the quote will hold; discover them on the day and it will not.
To quote we need the lease make good clause, the ingoing condition report if you have it, the floor plan, and the dates the space is empty and the inspection is booked. Call 1300 494 983 or send the documents through. For smaller tenancies and simpler handbacks, start at end of lease cleaning Sydney.
Condition report first, and a straight answer on what is repair work.
Dated room-by-room photos handed over with the invoice.
Booked against strip-out completion, with a buffer before inspection.
Whatever your lease says, which is why the lease is the starting point rather than a standard checklist. Most Sydney commercial leases require the premises returned in the condition recorded at the start, fair wear and tear excepted, with tenant alterations removed and the space clean and vacant. The practical benchmark is the ingoing condition report and its photographs. If your lease requires return to base building or to a warm shell, that is a strip-out obligation with cleaning attached, not a cleaning job.
No. We do not offer a bond-back or deposit-release guarantee and we would not trust a contractor who did. Whether your bank guarantee or security deposit is released is a decision made by the landlord and their agent against the whole make good obligation in your lease — which typically includes reinstatement works, repairs, painting and services, not just cleaning. A cleaning contractor controls the cleaning portion only, so a guarantee over the outcome would be a promise about something we do not control.
Two to three weeks is comfortable for a straightforward tenancy clean, and longer is better where a strip-out is happening first, where the tenancy is large, or where the handback date falls in the December to January period when everyone in Sydney is moving at once. What we really need early is the date the space will actually be empty, because a make good clean cannot start while furniture, cabling and IT equipment are still in place.
End of lease cleaning is the cleaning itself. Make good is the broader contractual obligation in a commercial lease to return the premises to an agreed condition, which can include removing your fitout, patching and painting walls, reinstating ceilings and floor coverings, removing signage and cabling, and restoring services — with cleaning as the final step. We deliver the cleaning component and the debris clearance, and we tell you plainly where an item on the schedule is builder work rather than cleaning.
Yes, and that is the usual sequence. The strip-out crew removes the fitout, leaves the substrate exposed, and generates a large volume of dust and debris that has to be cleared before the space can be presented. We come in behind them for the debris clearance, the full dust removal top-down, the floor treatment on whatever substrate has been left, and the detail work on glass, frames, amenities and services. Book us against the strip-out completion date rather than the lease end date.
It depends on what the condition report shows and what the lease requires. Where the carpet was in the premises at the start and is expected back in comparable condition, hot water extraction is usually the right treatment and it recovers more than most tenants expect. Where carpet has been damaged beyond fair wear and tear, or where the lease requires replacement, cleaning it is money spent twice. We give you an honest read on which situation you are in after looking at the floor.
Send the make good clause, the condition report and the inspection date. We come back with a fixed price and a straight read on what is cleaning and what is not.