Property Managers & Commercial Landlords

Managing property means exterior cleaning is a line item you have to defend, schedule around tenants, and explain to an owner who only sees the invoice. The problems are rarely technical. They are a scope vague enough that nobody can tell whether it was delivered, a price that changes halfway through, and a contractor who turns up when it suits them and floods a tenant entrance at eleven on a Saturday morning.

A scope specific enough to check

The useful quote for a manager is not a number for "exterior cleaning". It is a written scope: these elevations, this square footage of walkway, this dumpster enclosure, these entrances, the rust at the sprinkler heads on the north walk called out separately, on these dates, in this sequence. That is a document you can put in front of an owner, hold a contractor to, and compare against next year. Ask for it in that form.

Walk the property before the number

A price produced from a satellite image is a price that gets revised, and a revision mid-job is worse for you than a higher figure agreed up front. Walking it surfaces the things that change the work: where the run-off goes, which tenants open earliest, where the water spigots are, which elevation has the failing gutter that is causing the streaking you were about to pay to clean twice.

Cause, not just symptom

The most useful thing a contractor can tell a manager is that the wall does not need washing annually — it needs the gutter above it fixed once. That is a smaller invoice this year and a much smaller one every year after. It is worth choosing for, because it is the opposite of the incentive most contractors have.

Across a portfolio

If you hold several properties, the sensible structure is a single walk-through of each, one scope document per property, and a sequence spread across the season so the cost lands across the budget year rather than in one month. Spring — after the salt — is the pass that does the most good; if only one visit is funded, that is the one to fund.