Strata and Body Corporate Services in Melbourne.
Common-area cleaning, caretaking and building management for Victorian owners corporations, delivered under one contract with one accountable contact.
Committees, managers and developers handing over.
Three scopes, one contract. Common-area cleaning is the scheduled work in the shared spaces. Caretaking is the hands-on presence a schedule does not cover: bins, access, minor make-good, contractor escort. Building management is the accountability layer: scheduled attendance, contractor verification, the registers, and written reporting to the committee and the manager.
Now the honest part, because a committee that has spent years with a contractor who would say anything deserves it. Commercial cleaning is what Clean My Biz has done since 2015, and it is where the strength sits. Caretaking and building management are offered as an extension of that work, delivered through a documented program rather than an asserted pedigree. The rest of this page is that program written down, so you can judge it on what it commits to.
Which role are you actually buying?
These four get used interchangeably in conversation and are not interchangeable in a contract. The difference decides who answers for what.
| Role | Answers to | What it covers | What it does not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owners corporation manager (strata manager) |
The owners corporation, under a management contract | Levies, budgets, insurance, meetings, minutes, statutory notices and the books | Not on site day to day. Does not clean or supervise trades in person |
| Building manager | The owners corporation | Attendance on site, contractor oversight and verification, registers and records, reporting to the committee, coordinating repairs | Does not certify plant. Does not design, diagnose or warrant building systems |
| Caretaker | The owners corporation | One combined role: the building management outputs above, plus the hands-on cleaning and presentation work | The same limits as the building manager above |
| Cleaning contractor | Whoever holds the contract | The scheduled cleaning scope, and nothing outside it | Does not verify other contractors or hold the building's records |
Most Melbourne buildings under about 120 lots do not carry enough work to justify a separate building manager and a separate cleaner, which is why the combined caretaker appointment is common. It is also the appointment that goes wrong most often. Clean My Biz does not act as your owners corporation manager, and nothing here is a substitute for that role.
Priced as one, scheduled separately.
One contract and one invoice. Inside it, three scopes scheduled and reported apart, so nobody has to guess which part of the fee bought which part of the work.
Common-area cleaning
The shared areas, at daily, weekly, periodic and specialist frequencies fixed to your building at the site visit. The detailed cleaning scope sits on the spoke page.
Caretaking
Bin room operation and presentation, bin rotation and bay management, resident access to waste routes, hard waste holding and coordination, light globe and minor make-good within delegated limits, moves and deliveries, abandoned goods, contractor escort and sign-in.
Building management
Scheduled attendance, contractor verification, the registers set out below, the compliance calendar further down, liaison with your owners corporation manager, and a monthly written report to the committee and the manager.
Specialist and high-access work
Scoped and delivered through trusted contractors that Clean My Biz engages and manages, with Clean My Biz remaining your single accountable point of contact. We wash exterior surfaces, and anything at height is delivered this way.
Waste and recycling, where buildings visibly fail
In most buildings a resident has no route for anything larger than the chute, so oversized items are left beside it and recycling bays become unusable the moment nobody owns them. A building of any size should have a designated holding area and a standing private collection.
The conflict we name before you ask.
A contractor that cleans the building and also specifies, supervises, reports on and recommends payment for that cleaning is marking its own homework. The concern is real even where nothing dishonest happens, because an apparent conflict erodes confidence on its own.
Two published decisions show how it goes wrong. Both are New South Wales matters, worth stating before anyone reads them as Victorian law. In Sunaust Properties [2022] NSWCATD 20 a building manager charged separately for work already inside its agreement and obstructed an audit, and the tribunal terminated the agreement. In Australia City Properties [2020] NSWSC 1505 the combination itself was not invalid, and the dispute turned entirely on whether routine and specialist cleaning had been made explicit. In Queensland, section 117 of the body corporate legislation says in terms that a contract is not void merely because it combines roles. The combination is not the problem. Vagueness is.
- Disclosure up front. The combination and every financial relationship disclosed before the appointment is approved.
- Two visible scopes inside one contract. Building management outputs scheduled separately from daily, periodic and specialist cleaning, each with areas, frequency, staffing assumptions, consumables, exclusions, evidence of completion and the approval path for extras.
- Separate decision rights. We do not approve our own cleaning invoice, price our own variation, decide our own complaint, certify our own cure or evaluate our own renewal.
- Reporting separation. Distinct monthly sections and cost codes, with resident complaints routing to the committee or manager as well as to us, never only through us.
- Independent verification, proportionate to risk. The cleaning scope checked against the published specification by someone who is not the cleaning supervisor.
- No commission, rebate or referral fee from any contractor we engage on your behalf, stated in writing.
- Enforcement-ready records. Dated photographs, complaints, inspection checklists, service logs and approvals.
One distinction underneath all seven. Work performed and verified is a different signature from approved for payment under delegation, and separating the two in writing means nobody has to reconstruct a year later which one somebody meant.
Where a committee feels it pays too much, verification is usually what is missing.
An owners corporation typically pays fire, lift, mechanical and general contractors without anyone checking that they attended, that they completed, or that the faults they raised were closed. That is not an accusation about any contractor. It is a gap in the middle of the arrangement, and filling it is a service.
- Maintenance and service planner. Every contract in the building by frequency, with company and contact details, and a record of each attendance. The point is verification, not filing.
- Repairs log. Every fault: who reported it, what was done, by whom, and when it closed.
- Contractor sign-in and key register. Who entered, when, what was issued, and whether it came back.
- Asset and plant register. What is installed, who maintains it, at what frequency.
- Defect register. Load-bearing for a building still inside its defect period.
- Resident register. An emergency response capability, not a mailing list. If something happens in an apartment and nobody knows who lives there, that is a safety problem, and it is how a building answers who cannot self-evacuate.
The first ninety days are a baseline period: we record condition, photograph the periodic work, and bring findings to you rather than waiting for a complaint. The method that makes the registers real is a systems walkthrough with every incumbent contractor on site, writing down what each system is, who maintains it, and how often.
Defined, so nobody argues about it at 2am.
Two lists. The second matters as much as the first, because the calls a building most needs handled well are the ones that should never have come to us.
Treated as an emergency
- Fire alarm activation, or a fire service fault
- Active water ingress or flooding affecting common property or more than one lot
- Lift entrapment or lift failure
- Loss of power, water or lighting to common areas
- Failure of access control, a security breach, or a common door that will not secure
- Gas leak, or suspected gas leak
- Structural hazard, falling material, or a blocked egress path
- Sewage or drainage overflow
Not an emergency, redirected on the call
- Resident lockouts, which go to a locksmith at the resident's cost
- Faults inside a lot, including in-lot plumbing, appliances and the intercom handset
- Noise, parking and behavioural disputes, which go to the owners corporation manager or, where warranted, to police
- Anything that can safely wait for the next scheduled attendance
A defined commitment is worth more than a generous vague one, because the vague one gets quietly withdrawn in month three. Response targets are set in your contract and agreed at the site visit, against the attendance pattern your building actually needs.
The calendar, and what we do not sign.
The Occupancy Permit is the master document. It sets which essential safety measures the building carries and at what frequency, and it is common for the service contracts actually in place not to cover everything it requires. Reconciling the permit against the live contracts and reporting the gaps is free to perform, and it is one of the first things worth doing in any building.
On the Annual Essential Safety Measures Report the position needs stating exactly, because a provider offering to "handle your AESMR" is either wrong or being vague. The building manager compiles and prepares the report and holds the evidence pack. The owners corporation, as owner, signs it. Under the Building Regulations the obligation to ensure preparation sits with the owner, and the report is expressly required to be signed by the owner. The separate surveyor provisions cover the essential safety measures determination and the maintenance schedule, which are different documents. We do not sign it and we do not offer to.
The regulator is the Building and Plumbing Commission, formerly the Victorian Building Authority. Our duty is to identify, observe, report and coordinate. It is not to diagnose, certify, design or warrant plant or structure, and we are not a building surveyor. Where a question needs one, our job is to say so early rather than to have an opinion about it.
Built from a schedule, not from a guess.
Clean My Biz quotes after a free site visit and publishes no rate, because a rate quoted without walking the building is chosen to be attractive rather than right.
For market context, and stated as market context rather than as our rate: Melbourne office contract cleaning ran roughly $35 to $70 per hour in 2026, on figures published by the market aggregator WhatsTheDamage in Commercial Cleaning Cost Melbourne 2026. Two conditions travel with that band and it misleads without them. The published band is inclusive of GST, and Clean My Biz quotes exclusive of GST, so the bases differ and comparing them unadjusted compares nothing. And the band is office cleaning rather than strata, which sits differently because of after-hours access, resident presence, and the bin and access scopes an office does not carry.
The price is built from a task and frequency schedule: the areas, the frequency, the hours those imply, and the total that follows. A price that can be checked line by line beats a lower one that cannot, because the lower one is where the scope quietly shrinks.
The Owners Corporations Act, in plain language.
Victoria has no statutory minimum number of quotations at any dollar threshold, and no equivalent of the New South Wales two-quote rule.
The reform timeline binds owners corporation managers, not building managers. Registration and education requirements commence by 30 June 2027, an officer in effective control by 1 August 2027, and continuing professional development from 1 April 2028. Those obligations sit on your manager, not on us.
The common property duties are set out on our strata common area cleaning page. This is general information, not legal advice.
Repairs against improvements, lot against common property.
Most template agreements set approval thresholds by dollar value alone. That is the wrong test, and it is the low-value improvement that causes the argument.
The test is not the amount. If something breaks, it gets repaired within the delegated limit. If something is new, changed or added, it goes to the committee regardless of value. A $20 improvement needs approval and a $500 repair may not.
| Situation | Whose responsibility |
|---|---|
| Anything inside a lot | The lot owner |
| A meter serving one apartment only, even in a common cupboard | The lot owner |
| An intercom handset inside an apartment | The lot owner |
| The intercom system failing across multiple apartments | The owners corporation |
| One apartment floods and damages the one below | The apartment that caused it |
| A pipe bursts in a common area and floods an apartment | The owners corporation |
| Unsure | Ask the owners corporation manager |
Honesty about resident platforms, rather than a recommendation.
On resident platforms, what we can offer is honesty rather than a recommendation. They fail for documented reasons: they solve the manager's problem rather than the resident's, older residents and changing interfaces defeat them, invitations and password resets are too complicated, and nothing visibly closes. Clean My Biz works with whatever platform the owners corporation already holds, and we do not sell you one.
Strata and building management, eight questions answered.
If your question isn't here, the full FAQ covers 28, or call 0433 173 504.
What is the difference between a building manager and our owners corporation manager?
Can one contractor do both the cleaning and the building management?
How do we know the contractors we pay are actually attending?
Who signs the Annual Essential Safety Measures Report?
How many quotes does an owners corporation need in Victoria?
What counts as an emergency, and what does not?
What insurance do you carry?
How do we switch without a service gap?
Three guides for committees and managers.
Written for the people who compare providers and answer for the result.
Related services in this sector.
Book a free site visit.
We walk the building, record condition, and come back with a task and frequency schedule and a price built from it, so the committee can check it line by line.
The cleaning scope on its own is set out on our strata common-area cleaning page, and buildings in the western precincts are served from our Docklands coverage.
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