Case study — building and parties anonymised

Castlecrag Strata Block, 14 Lots

A 14-lot residential strata scheme off Edinburgh Road in Castlecrag 2068 came to us through its strata manager in autumn 2026. The building — 1970s brick, one lobby, two stair cores, a shared laundry and a basement bin room — had been through three cleaning contractors in two years. Each had started well and faded within months, and the committee had reached the point of debating whether owners should simply roster the cleaning themselves.

Why the previous arrangements failed

• No written scope — each contractor cleaned to their own shrinking definition of the job
• Rotating cleaners meant nobody learned the building's quirks, like the laundry drain that needs flushing weekly
• The bin room was skipped whenever time ran short, which was often — and it was the item owners noticed most
• Issues on common property went unreported until they became AGM complaints

The reset

We walked the building with two committee members and wrote the scope down to the item: lobby and entry glass weekly, stair cores vacuumed and spot-mopped weekly, handrails and light switches disinfected with TGA-approved product, laundry cleaned and drain flushed, bin room disinfected and deodorised every visit, bins presented Thursday night and returned Friday. One police-checked cleaner owns the building, a fortnightly deeper rotation covers skirtings, sills and cobwebs, and a quarterly pressure wash keeps the entry path and driveway in shape. Every visit ends with a photo-stamped checklist to the strata manager, and anything broken or tagged gets photographed and emailed the same evening.

Pricing was set as a fixed weekly fee built from a $34/hr contract rate — about eight percent more than the cheapest previous contractor, with roughly twice the delivered scope.

Twelve weeks in

• Every scheduled visit delivered, evidenced by the checklist trail
• Bin room complaints — previously the top agenda item — dropped to zero
• Four maintenance faults reported early, including a failing stair light that was fixed before the dark half of winter
• The committee moved cleaning from a standing agenda item to a one-line noting

The lesson generalises to any small scheme: churn is a scope problem, not a suburb problem. If your building is stuck in the same cycle, start with strata cleaning Roseville or the local Castlecrag page, sanity-check pricing on the rates page, and see how we run clinical sites in the Hill Street dental case study.

How the scope was rebuilt line by line

The turnaround method is worth recording because any committee can replicate it. We walked the block with two owners on a Saturday morning and photographed every shared surface — lobby, stairs, bin room, letterboxes, the sandstone entry path — creating a baseline nobody could argue with later. Each surface then got its own line with its own frequency: daily was reserved for nothing, weekly for lobby and stairs, monthly for letterboxes and light fittings, quarterly for the soft-wash of the shaded path that had been quietly growing moss for years. The committee approved the scope by email vote inside a week because, for the first time, they were approving specifics rather than a lump sum.

The second mechanism was the fault loop. Cleaners are in a building more often than any strata manager, so every visit ends with a two-line report — anything broken, leaking, flickering or missing goes to the managing agent the same night. That loop is what caught the failing stair light, and it is what turned the cleaning contract from a cost line into the building's early-warning system. Twelve months on, the scheme has renewed on unchanged terms — the first cleaning renewal in its recent history that went through without a single owner objection.