Property management cleaning services: what to require from your building cleaner

A property manager should require three things from a building cleaning contractor: a scope that matches what the leases promise, one person who handles every tenant request, and inspection results you can show to tenants and owners. Everything else, from elevator tracks to after-hours keys, follows from those.

This is written for multi-tenant office and medical office buildings. It covers the common areas, tenant suites, the lease problem most cleaning contracts ignore, request routing, access, and inspections.

Common areas: lobby, elevators, corridors, shared restrooms

Common areas are cleaned nightly and covered by a day porter during open hours, because tenants and visitors use them all day.

The lobby is where owners and prospective tenants form their view of the building, so set its standard higher than the rest. A day porter on a set route keeps lobby glass, shared restrooms, and elevators presentable between the night crew's visits.

Elevator cleaning, done properly

Elevators get used by every tenant and noticed by every visitor, and they are often cleaned last and fastest.

A nightly elevator clean should cover:

• Cab floor vacuumed or mopped, including the corners where grit collects.
• Stainless walls, doors, and handrails cleaned with a stainless cleaner, wiped with the grain.
• Call buttons, panels, and hall buttons on every floor wiped.
• Door sill tracks vacuumed. Grit in the tracks can jam doors and draws service calls.
• Mirrors and glass cleaned.

Two lines to keep clear. Protective pads hung for a move or a delivery need an owner who removes them. And anything inside the hoistway, under the cab, or in the machine room belongs to your elevator contractor, not the cleaners.

Tenant suites: clean to the lease, not to habit

Tenant suites should be cleaned to the standard each lease sets, which may differ from tenant to tenant.

In full-service buildings the landlord provides suite cleaning, usually nightly on business days, and the lease often spells out the standard. Other tenants may clean their own suites, or pay your contractor directly. Medical tenants add their own rules for clinical rooms. Our post on medical office building common areas covers how that split works when practices share a building.

Keep a one-page sheet per suite: service nights, rooms in scope, rooms off limits, alarm and access notes, and any tenant-specific rules. The crew follows the sheet. The sheet follows the lease.

Vacant suites and turnovers

Vacant suites drop off cleaning routes, and that is how a broker ends up touring a prospect through dead insects, dusty sills, and a kitchenette that smells like a dry drain. Put vacant space on the schedule at a lighter frequency, often weekly or every other week: dust, vacuum, run water into the sinks and floor drains, check for leaks.

When a tenant moves out, plan the turnover as one job: a deep clean of the suite, carpet extraction, and floor work on hard surfaces, finished before the space is shown or handed to the next tenant's contractor. When a tour is booked on short notice, one call to the account manager should get the suite walked and touched up the night before.

The lease problem most cleaning contracts ignore

Many office leases include a cleaning specification: a list of what the landlord will clean and how often. Tenants read it. Cleaning contractors almost never see it. That gap is where most tenant disputes start.

If the lease promises nightly vacuuming and weekly dusting, and your cleaning contract says vacuuming three nights a week, the tenant is right and you are paying for the difference in goodwill. Close the gap before the contract is signed:

1. Pull the cleaning specification from each lease form in the building, including older leases still in force.
2. Write the highest common standard into the base scope.
3. List the exceptions by suite, where one lease promises more.
4. Give the contractor the list, so the crew cleans to it and the inspection checks it.

Then decide how above-standard work is billed. A tenant who wants extra kitchen cleaning, a carpet extraction after an event, or a deep clean before a move-in should be able to ask for it, and you should be able to bill it back. Ask your contractor to price these as separate work orders with the tenant's name on them. That keeps base-building costs clean for operating expense reconciliation and keeps one tenant's extras off everyone else's bill.

Tenant requests through one account manager

Tenant requests should go to one person, who logs them, schedules them, and tells you when they are closed. In a building with twenty tenants, twenty people texting the night crew is not a system.

A workable request flow:

• Tenants send requests to the property management office or a single shared address.
• The office forwards them to the contractor's account manager.
• The account manager logs each request with a time, schedules it, and confirms when it is done.
• Repeat requests from the same suite get reviewed, because they often point to a scope gap.

Ask any bidder who your account manager will be and how urgent requests are handled during the day. We assign one dedicated account manager per client, and urgent requests get a fast response. When you compare proposals, our guide to comparing commercial cleaning bids shows how to level them.

After-hours access, keys, and security

Your contractor is in the building when nobody else is, so access rules belong in the contract, not in a conversation.

• Keys and badges issued by name, signed for, and returned when a crew member leaves.
• Alarm codes assigned per person where the system allows it.
• Suites with late-working tenants: the crew cleans around them or returns, and never asks them to leave.
• Locked rooms stay locked. Off-limits rooms are named on the suite sheet.
• Background-checked crews, and a certificate of insurance on file before the first night.

Inspections you can show tenants and owners

Inspections only help a property manager if you can see the results. Ask how supervisors inspect, how often, what areas get scored, and how you receive the findings.

Walk the building with the account manager once a month, starting with the lobby and one shared restroom on each floor. Bring the request log. Areas that draw repeat requests deserve a second look at the scope or the frequency. When an owner asks how the building looks, you want inspection results, not an opinion. If you manage several buildings, our post on multi-site cleaning contracts covers keeping one standard across them.

Walk your building with us

We walk common areas and a sample of suites with you, bring the lease cleaning standard into the scope, and price base building, suites, porter hours, and tenant extras as separate lines. Nightly office cleaning, day porter, floor care, and light maintenance sit on one contract with one account manager. Book a free facility assessment or call (202) 968-1190.