Comparing Strata Cleaning and Building Management Quotes: A Committee Guide
Comparing strata cleaning quotes on what each one puts in writing.
How an owners corporation compares cleaning and building management proposals: the four ways to buy the work, the documents to request before you look at a price, and the questions that separate a checkable scope from a hopeful one.
Published 24 August 2026 by Clean My Biz. 10 min read.
What an Owners Corporation Is Actually Buying When It Buys Cleaning.
An owners corporation buys the presentation and upkeep of common property, on a written schedule the committee can check. That is the whole purchase, and every quote should be read against it.
Common property is the lobby, the lifts and stairwells, the corridors, the carpark, the bin room and recycling bay, the entrances and the external surfaces the lot owners share. The inside of a private lot is not part of it. A cleaning contractor works to the schedule for those shared areas; a building manager adds attendance, contractor oversight, records and reporting on top of it. A committee comparing quotes is comparing how much of that is written down, by whom, and what it can verify month to month.
This guide is for the committee member or owners corporation manager who has three proposals on the table and needs to compare them on something better than the total at the bottom. It covers the four ways the work is commonly bought, the documents to ask for before the price means anything, and the questions that tell you whether a scope is checkable or hopeful. Where we describe what Clean My Biz does, it is on the same terms we would want you to apply to any bidder.
Four Ways a Committee Can Buy the Work, on What Each One Puts in Writing.
A committee chooses between arrangements before it chooses between companies, and the table compares the four common ones on what a committee can check in the documents in front of it. Nothing here is ranked; the right row depends on the building.
| Arrangement | Contracts with | Written scope | Callout route | Bin room | Exteriors | Verified monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning contractor only | One cleaning contractor, usually engaged through the owners corporation manager | The scheduled cleaning tasks and frequencies for common areas, and nothing beyond them | The manager, who then finds a contractor for anything that is not cleaning | Bin room presentation if it is scheduled; rotation and resident access usually are not | Not covered unless quoted separately | Whether the scheduled tasks were done, if the contract requires a sign-off sheet |
| Cleaning plus building management from one contractor | One contractor, one contract, one invoice, one accountable contact | The cleaning schedule plus attendance, contractor oversight, registers and reporting, each defined as a task | The contractor, through a stated route that logs the request and who attended | A scheduled program: rotation, bay presentation, a resident waste route, hard waste holding | Ground-level washing scheduled; anything at height through a managed access contractor | A written monthly report, the contractor and callout registers, and the schedule |
| Separate specialist contractors | Several contractors, each coordinated by the manager or a committee member | Each contractor's own scope; gaps between scopes belong to nobody unless the manager assigns them | Whichever contractor the request is routed to, once someone decides which | Depends on a waste contractor being engaged; often falls between the cleaner and the collection | A separate access or facade contractor, with its own insurance and scope | Each contractor's invoices and reports; nobody compiles them unless that is a task |
| Caretaking supplied under a contract | A contractor supplying the on-site hours under one contract, with one accountable contact. Employed directly instead, the owners corporation is the employer and carries payroll, superannuation, workers compensation and supervision | The caretaking duties and the hours they are worked, written as a scope with frequencies. Employed directly, a position description does that job | The contractor, through the stated route, including outside the on-site hours if the contract says so. Employed directly, cover outside those hours is arranged by the committee | Within the contracted hours as scheduled tasks, at the standard the scope sets | Ground-level washing within the scope; anything at height still through a managed access contractor | The reports and registers the contract requires, and the hours actually attended |
Every cell is something to confirm in the proposal, the contract or the position description, not a fact about any particular company. A bidder may offer more than the row it sits in. The point of the table is that the committee reads the documents for these seven things before it reads the price.
How to Read a Strata Cleaning Quote Line by Line.
A strata cleaning quote is only comparable when it is built from a task and frequency schedule: the areas, how often each is attended, the hours that implies, and the total that follows. A total with no schedule behind it cannot be compared with anything, including last year's price.
Ask each bidder for the schedule as a document. It should name every common area, state the frequency for each task in that area, and let you see where the hours come from. Two quotes with different totals are usually two different schedules, and the cheaper one is often the one where the bin room is attended fortnightly rather than twice a week, or where the carpark sweep is missing entirely. Read the schedules against each other before reading the totals against each other.
For market context, and stated as market context rather than as any bidder's rate: Melbourne office contract cleaning ran roughly $35 to $70 per hour in 2026 on figures published by the market aggregator WhatsTheDamage in its Commercial Cleaning Cost Melbourne 2026 guide. That band is quoted GST-inclusive. Strata common-area work is priced from the same kind of schedule, so a quote whose implied hourly figure sits far below that range is worth a direct question about how the labour underneath it is paid. Clean My Biz quotes each building after a free site visit, from the schedule, and does not publish a rate card; the band above is the market's figure, not ours.
Bin Rooms and Recycling: What a Scheduled Program Has to Cover.
A bin room program is four things on a schedule: bin rotation to the collection point and back, presentation of the room and the bays, a route for residents to dispose of anything larger than the chute takes, and a holding area with a standing collection for hard waste. A quote that covers only the first is a cleaning line, not a program.
The failure is easy to recognise because most committees have seen it. Oversized items are left beside the chute because nobody has said where else they can go, the recycling bay becomes unusable the moment nobody owns it, and the residents who find it hardest are the ones least able to carry a box down two levels. None of that is solved by cleaning the room more often. It is solved by someone owning the route, the holding area and the collection, and by that ownership being written into the scope as tasks with frequencies.
When you compare proposals, look for each of the four elements named as a task. Where a bidder says it "manages waste", ask which of the four it means. Where council or collection arrangements are mentioned, treat them as plain facts about who collects what and when, not as anything more.
Reactive Callouts: Ask About the Route, Not the Promise.
The useful question about callouts is who answers, how the request is logged, and how the committee sees what happened afterwards. A route the committee can follow is worth more than a figure it cannot check.
Ask each bidder to describe the path from a resident noticing a problem to the problem being attended: who the resident or the manager contacts, whether the request is recorded with a time and a name, who decides what it is, and where the record ends up. Then ask to see a sample of that record from another building, with the identifying details removed. A bidder that keeps a callout register can show you one. A bidder that does not will describe a process instead.
Two boundaries belong in the scope in writing. First, a callout is a callout to common property: a request that would take a crew inside a private lot is outside the owners corporation's purchase and should be referred, not quoted. Second, after-hours attendance is a scheduling arrangement that should be named in the contract, so that "after hours" means the same thing to the committee and the contractor. Clean My Biz schedules after-hours attendance and logs each callout by request, attendance and outcome; the committee sees those entries in the monthly report.
External Walls, Fascias and Entrances: How the Work Gets Delivered.
Exterior washing removes the grime, cobwebs and staining that accumulate on walls, fascias, entrance canopies and ground-level glass, and it is bought as a scheduled task or an annual option. The question to settle in the quote is how each part of the building is reached, because that decides who does it and whose insurance covers it.
Ground-level surfaces are washed from the ground. Anything above reach is a different job with different equipment, and the honest way to quote it is to say so. Clean My Biz washes exterior surfaces at ground level with its own crews, and anything at height is scoped and delivered through a trusted access contractor that we engage and manage, with Clean My Biz remaining your single accountable point of contact. We do not describe that as an in-house height capability, and we would be cautious of any bidder who describes it that way without naming who actually goes up.
When comparing, ask for the exterior item to be priced separately from the schedule, with the access method for each elevation stated. That lets the committee decide the frequency on its own terms rather than inheriting one inside a bundled total.
Building Management Is a Service, Not a Credential.
Building management, as an owners corporation buys it, is scheduled attendance, oversight of the other contractors who come to the building, records kept for the committee, and liaison with the owners corporation manager. It is a set of tasks with a frequency, and it should be quoted as one.
What it is not is a licence, an accreditation or a guarantee about the building's systems. A building manager verifies that the lift contractor attended and signed in; the building manager does not certify the lift. That distinction matters when you compare proposals, because a bidder that implies otherwise is offering something it cannot deliver, and a committee that expects otherwise will be disappointed by every bidder. Clean My Biz holds no facilities-management accreditation and does not claim one; what we offer is the attendance, the registers, the monthly written report and one accountable contact, and each of those is a line in the scope you can check.
The practical test for any building management proposal is whether it names the registers it will keep, the report it will send and how often, and who the committee calls. If those three are in writing, the service exists. If they are described in general terms, it does not yet.
The Documents to Request Before You Compare Prices.
Seven documents make a proposal comparable. Ask every bidder for the same seven, and compare what arrives rather than what is described.
| Document | What to check | Why it matters to a committee |
|---|---|---|
| Task and frequency schedule | Every common area named; a frequency against every task; hours visible | It is the only basis on which two totals can be compared |
| Certificate of currency, public liability | Insured name matches the quoting entity; expiry date; cover amount adequate for the building | Common property has many users and a claim lands on the owners corporation. Clean My Biz carries $20 million public liability cover and provides the certificate on request |
| Workers compensation evidence | Current, in the same entity name | An uninsured worker injured on common property becomes the committee's problem |
| Crew arrangements | Whether crews are the bidder's own or subcontracted; whether they are police-checked | These people hold keys and fobs to a building where residents live |
| Callout route and a sample register entry | Who answers, how requests are logged, how outcomes are reported | Turns a promise about responsiveness into something the committee can inspect |
| Sample monthly report | What it records, whether it would tell the committee anything it could act on | The report is how a committee that is not on site knows the work happened |
| Exit and variation terms | Notice period; how a scope change is priced; what happens at the end of a term | A long lock-in behind an attractive first-year figure is a price paid later |
A bidder that has these ready is describing how it already operates. A bidder that needs three weeks to assemble them is telling you something too. Clean My Biz supplies all seven as its standard tender pack, and has done so since it began operating in 2015.
Eight Questions a Committee Can Put to Every Bidder.
These eight questions can be put to every bidder in the same words, and the answers compared side by side. They are written so that a good answer is a document or a name, not an adjective.
- Which areas of common property are in the schedule, and at what frequency? The answer is the schedule itself.
- Who is the one person the committee calls, and who covers when they are away? A name and a cover arrangement.
- Who takes a callout, how is it logged, and where does the record go? A route and a sample register entry.
- Which of the four bin room elements are in scope: rotation, presentation, resident waste route, hard waste holding and collection? Each one named as a task, or named as excluded.
- For each elevation, how is exterior washing reached, and who goes up? Ground level from the ground; anything at height through a named access contractor.
- What registers are kept, and what does the monthly report contain? A sample report from another building.
- Are the crews yours or subcontracted, and are they police-checked? A plain answer, either way.
- What is the notice period, and how is a scope change priced? The clause, not a reassurance.
If a bidder answers all eight with documents, the committee has a proposal it can hold the contractor to. If the answers are mostly descriptions of intent, the committee has a hope, and the price attached to it is not yet a price.
Comparing Strata Quotes, Questions Answered.
What should a strata cleaning quote include?
Is the inside of an apartment part of a strata cleaning contract?
What is the difference between a cleaning contractor and a building manager?
Should a committee ask for a callout response time?
How much does strata common area cleaning cost in Melbourne?
Put the Same Seven Documents to Us.
If your committee is comparing cleaning or building management proposals, send us the eight questions above and we will answer them with the documents. The schedule is built after a free site visit, from your building rather than from a template.
What we do for owners corporations is set out on the strata and body corporate page, and the common-area cleaning scope itself is on the strata common areas service page. Book a free site visit or call 0433 173 504.
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