Vacate and turnover cleans booked inside a real leasing window, common property on a recurring schedule, pre-inspection presentation cleans, and a photo-documented report on every job so you can separate cleaning from damage before you speak to the owner.
Property managers need vacate and turnover cleans on short notice, recurring common property schedules, and presentation cleans before inspections. Ongoing schedules in Sydney generally run between $30 and $45 per hour, vacate cleans between $40 and $50, and common property for eight to twenty units between $500 and $1,400 per month.
Property management runs on dates that cannot move. Keys are handed back on a Friday, the final inspection is Monday, and a new tenant has already given notice at their current address. A cleaning provider who takes three days to respond to a booking request is not slow, they are unusable, because the delay lands as a leasing gap the owner pays for and a conversation the property manager has to have.
We structure agency work differently from one-off residential jobs for that reason. Agencies with regular volume get an agreed lead time written into the service agreement and held capacity rather than being placed in a general queue, a single contact who knows the portfolio, and a booking process that does not require re-explaining the property every time. Recurring buildings are already known to the crew, which removes the familiarisation time on every attendance.
The second thing property managers need is honesty about scope before the job, not after. A property that has been occupied for six years by a tenant with three dogs is not a standard vacate clean, and pretending otherwise produces a job that runs short, an unhappy owner and an argument about the invoice. We assess and say so up front, quote it properly, and let the agency make an informed decision about what to charge to whom.
Agreed lead times, one contact, consolidated monthly invoicing. Month to month, 30 days written notice.
1300 494 983Enquire OnlineEverybody in property management knows which items decide a final inspection, because they are the same items every time. The oven, cooktop and rangehood filter. Inside the kitchen cupboards and drawers, and the top of the overheads. Bathroom grout, shower screens, the exhaust fan and the toilet cistern base. Window glass, tracks and flyscreens. Skirtings, architraves, door tops and light fittings. Wardrobe interiors and mirror doors. Walls where marks will come off without taking paint with them. Floors, the balcony, and the garage or carport.
Our vacate scope names all of those in writing, so nobody is relying on a shared assumption about what a bond clean includes. Where a property has items outside that scope, we identify them before starting rather than after: carpet that needs professional extraction, a wall that needs painting rather than washing, mould driven by a building defect, damage, or possessions left behind that the agency needs to handle under its own process.
We do not offer a bond-back guarantee and we do not offer a free re-clean, and we say so plainly because both are common in this market and neither is honest. Whether a bond is released is a decision made by the agent and, if disputed, by the tribunal, on evidence that includes the entry condition report and fair wear and tear. No cleaning contractor controls that outcome, and promising it simply moves an argument from before the job to after it. Properties needing the full residential end-of-lease treatment are handled under our end of lease cleaning scope.
The most useful thing a cleaning contractor can give a property manager is not a clean property, it is evidence. Every job comes back with a completion record naming the property, the date and time, the scope completed, and photographs. Alongside it sits the exceptions list: everything found that was not a cleaning matter, photographed and described.
That distinction is the whole value. A scratched benchtop, a chipped tile, a stained carpet that will not lift, water damage under a sink, mould behind a wardrobe on an external wall, a broken flyscreen or a missing light diffuser are not failures of cleaning. If they are documented at the time of the clean, the property manager can raise them with the owner as maintenance, or with the outgoing tenant as damage, with a photograph and a date. If they are not documented, they surface at the entry inspection with the new tenant and become the agency's problem to explain.
The same applies to recurring work. Common property attendance records show which building was serviced, when, and what was done, so an owners corporation or a landlord asking why the levy pays for cleaning gets an answer immediately. Defects noticed during routine attendance, a failed light in a stairwell, a leaking tap in a bin room, a lifting tile at an entry, are reported the same day so a small repair does not become a claim.
Property managers field complaints about common areas far more often than about individual units, and the complaints cluster in predictable places. Bin rooms are first by a wide margin: overflowing bins, spilled waste, odour in summer and the pest activity that follows. Lifts and lobbies are second, because they are the spaces every resident passes through daily and form their opinion of the building in. Car parks and stairwells are third, particularly where they are also where residents dump items they do not want.
A recurring schedule fixes most of it, and the frequency matters more than the intensity. A bin room hosed out weekly is a problem; a bin room attended twice a week with bins rotated, floor washed and the room left dry is not. Lobbies cleaned on the day residents notice, rather than on whatever day suits a run sheet, generate visibly fewer complaints. Entry glazing, letterbox banks and the front path do more for how a building is perceived than any amount of internal work.
Buildings under an owners corporation are usually best served by our full strata cleaning scope, and larger residential blocks by apartment building cleaning. Where an agency manages both the tenancies and the common property, running them together means one crew that knows the building and one report covering both.
Not every booking is a turnover. Property managers regularly need a property presented at short notice: before a routine inspection where the owner is attending, before a valuation, before an open home on a tenanted property, or before photography for a re-listing. Those are lighter, faster jobs with a different objective, and they should be priced as presentation work rather than as a full vacate clean.
Sales stock has its own rhythm. Vacant properties on the market accumulate dust surprisingly fast, particularly in Sydney where an open home season can run for six weeks, and a property that photographed well in week one shows badly by week five. A short recurring presentation visit through a campaign costs little and protects the marketing spend. Properties being prepared for sale are covered under our real estate cleaning service.
Agencies with a commercial or mixed portfolio also need tenancy make-good cleans, vacant office presentation before a lease campaign, and recurring cleaning inside tenanted commercial space where the lease puts it on the landlord. Those are quoted against our commercial cleaning scope, and larger managed portfolios are usually run through facilities management cleaning with consolidated reporting. Call 1300 494 983 to set up an agency account.
Four things, in order of how often they come up. Vacate and turnover cleans between tenancies, which have to be booked and completed inside a very short window. Common property cleaning at the buildings the agency manages, which is a recurring schedule rather than an event. Pre-inspection and pre-listing presentation cleans ahead of a routine inspection, an open home or a valuation. And reactive attendances when a tenant leaves a property in poor condition, a unit is affected by a leak, or a bin room becomes a health complaint.
Ongoing cleaning in Sydney generally runs between $30 and $45 per hour under a regular schedule, and one-off or vacate cleans between $40 and $50 per hour. Common property for a building of eight to twenty units typically falls between $500 and $1,400 per month depending on the number of levels, whether there is a lift, and how much external and bin room work is included. Vacate cleans are quoted per property after the property size and condition are known.
The realistic window in Sydney property management is short, because the outgoing tenant hands back keys and the incoming tenant is often booked within days. We schedule vacate cleans as priority work with an agreed lead time in the service agreement, and for agencies with regular volume we hold capacity rather than treating each request as a new booking. What we will not do is promise a same-day turnaround on a property that has not been assessed, because a property in poor condition takes the time it takes.
Yes. Every vacate and turnover clean comes back with a completion record naming the property, the date, the scope completed and the items that were outside the cleaning scope, with photographs. That distinction matters: damage, wear, mould caused by a building defect, carpet staining that will not lift and items left behind are not cleaning failures, and an agency that has them documented separately is in a far better position with both the owner and the outgoing tenant.
We perform a thorough end-of-lease clean to a written scope covering the areas these cleans are assessed on: oven and cooktop, rangehood filter, kitchen cupboards inside and out, bathrooms including grout, shower screens and exhaust fans, all internal glass and tracks, skirtings, light fittings, wardrobes, walls where marks can be removed without damaging paint, floors, balcony and garage. We do not offer a bond-back guarantee or a free re-clean, because the outcome of a bond claim is decided by the agent and the tribunal, not by us.
Yes, and running both through the same provider is where agencies get the most value. Common property is a recurring schedule covering lobbies, corridors, lifts, stairwells, bin rooms, car parks, letterboxes and external entries, while turnovers are event driven. Combining them means one point of contact for the building, one reporting line to the owners corporation or the landlord, and a crew already familiar with the building when a turnover comes up in it.
Agreed lead times, photo-documented reports, and a straight answer about scope before the job rather than after it.
