A building is judged on its common areas
Owners and prospective buyers form their opinion of a scheme in the thirty seconds between the front door and the lift. That is why strata work is structured differently to office work: it is a fixed, repeated round across the areas everyone passes through, rather than a deep clean of any one space.
A standard round covers the entry and lobby, corridors and stairwells, lift interiors and tracks, letterbox areas, bin and garbage rooms, car park sweeping, and the glass at every entry point. Periodic work — pressure washing to driveways and bin areas, external and common window cleaning, carpet extraction to corridors — is scheduled through the year rather than left until a committee complains.
Reporting your committee can put in the minutes
Strata managers and committees are accountable to owners who were not there when the work was done. A report that says "cleaned as per scope" does not help them.
We report after each visit with photographs, which does three things: it shows the round was completed, it gives the committee something concrete for the next meeting, and it creates a dated record of damage, dumped rubbish or vandalism that is genuinely useful when an insurance claim or a by-law breach comes up.
The things that happen outside the round
Strata work is defined as much by the unscheduled events as the weekly round — a burst pipe on level three, a bin room left open over a long weekend, graffiti across the entry, a resident moving out and leaving half a lounge suite in the car park.
We take calls on these at any hour and attend on an agreed response basis. Photographic records are supplied where they may be needed for insurance or for recovering costs from a lot owner.
- Floods, burst pipes and water damage clean-up
- Bin room overflow and after-hours waste incidents
- Graffiti and vandalism response, with dated photographs
- Dumped rubbish removal from common property
- Post-move-out and post-renovation common area cleans
Working with strata managers
We are used to being one line item in a portfolio a manager is running across dozens of buildings. That means the scope is written so it can be handed to an owners corporation without translation, the price is fixed against that scope, and the invoice arrives on the same cycle each period.
Contracts run annually and are reviewed each year against how the building has actually changed — new bins, a new car park gate, a lobby refurbishment, a shift in resident numbers.