Should a mixed-use building use one cleaning contractor?

The archetypal commercial building in Newtown 2042 is three storeys of Victorian brick with a shopfront at street level, a studio or professional suite on the first floor, and either apartments or more suites above that. There is one entry, one stair, one bin store out the back and possibly a small rear yard.

What that building typically has is three cleaning arrangements. The retailer has their own cleaner. The first-floor tenant has another. The owners corporation has a third for the stair, the entry and the bin store. None of them talk to each other, and each is paying separately for someone to travel to the same address.

The predictable consequence is the boundary dispute. The landing outside the first-floor door is common property, so the tenant cleaner does not touch it and the strata cleaner attends fortnightly. The bin store is common property but the retail tenancy generates ninety percent of the waste. The entry glass is common property on the inside and nobody clear on the outside. Every one of those becomes a complaint eventually.

The savings come from three places, and only one of them is negotiating power.

The obvious objection is that a shared contractor means somebody subsidises somebody else. That is only true if the scope is vague. The fix is to write separate scopes with separate frequencies and separate invoices, delivered by the same crew on the same visit.

The retail tenancy gets its own scope and its own weekly figure. The upper-floor suite gets its own. The owners corporation gets a common-area scope covering the entry, stair, landings, bin store and external glass. Three documents, three invoices, one attendance. Everybody can see exactly what they are paying for, and the crew is not standing on a landing wondering whose square metre it is.

In practice one party has to raise it, and the owners corporation is usually best placed because they already have a contract and a manager. But a retail tenant frustrated with their bin store can start it just as easily by asking the strata manager whether the common-area contractor could quote the shop as well.

The one thing worth insisting on regardless of who leads is month-to-month terms for every party. A consolidated arrangement should not become a lock-in for the tenant with the least bargaining power, and any provider confident in their work will not need one.