Commercial · Multi-family
Apartment complex and common area cleaning in Fort Worth
A community's common areas are the only part of the property every resident and every prospective resident sees. They are also the part most often cleaned to a scope written for an office, which is why so many of them fail on the same four surfaces.
- Common areas and turnovers
- One contract, one contact
- Bonded and insured
The four surfaces that decide how a community reads
Ask a resident what a badly maintained building looks like and they will describe these four, in roughly this order.
The entry and its glass. Doors, sidelights, the vestibule and the mat well. It is the first and last thing every resident touches every day, and fingerprints at handle height on glass are the single most visible failure in a building.
Corridor floors at the wall line. Vacuuming a corridor down the middle takes a third of the time and looks fine at a glance. What accumulates at the wall base, in the door reveals and under the fire doors is what people notice — usually about six weeks in.
The elevator cab. Stainless walls, the button panel, the door track and the corner where the floor meets the wall. The track in particular is a magnet for grit and is almost never in a generic scope.
The trash room. It is the one area where a poor clean produces a smell rather than a look, and smell travels into corridors. Chute doors, the compactor surround, the floor and the drain need naming explicitly and doing frequently.
Everything else — mail rooms, amenity kitchens, fitness rooms, coworking lounges, pool surrounds, dog washes, package rooms — matters too. But if those four are right, residents rate the building as well kept. If they are wrong, nothing else compensates.
Written before it is priced
What a common area scope covers
Frequency is set per area rather than per building. A leasing office and a stair core do not need the same attention.
- Entry, lobby and circulation
- Entry glass and door hardware on both faces, at handle height and above
- Mat wells lifted, cleaned beneath and replaced
- Corridor floors cleaned to the wall line and into door reveals
- Stair treads, nosings, handrails and stringers
- Elevator cabs including the button panel, the door track and the floor corners
- Reachable light fixtures, vents and ceiling returns
- Amenity space
- Fitness rooms — equipment touch points, mirrors, mats and rubber flooring
- Amenity kitchens and coffee bars including appliance interiors on rotation
- Lounge and coworking furniture, tables and shared surfaces
- Package and mail rooms including shelving and the floor beneath
- Pool surrounds, furniture and reachable glass, excluding water treatment
- Restrooms cleaned, disinfected and restocked
- Back of house
- Trash and recycling rooms, chute doors and compactor surrounds
- Floor drains cleared and surrounds scrubbed
- Service corridors and staff areas
- Breezeways, landings and exterior stair treads on agreed rotations
- Leasing and tours
- Leasing office, tour path and model units
- Entry glass and signage surfaces on the tour route
- Model unit refresh before scheduled tour days
Pool water treatment, pressure washing, landscaping and pest control are separate trades. Unit turnovers are a related but separately scoped service.
Common areas and unit turnovers under one arrangement
Most communities run these as two contracts with two vendors, and it is usually a mistake. The common area schedule is predictable and recurring; turnovers are unpredictable and deadline-driven. Splitting them means the turnover vendor has no reason to prioritize you in a busy month.
Run together, the arithmetic changes. A crew already on the property on a fixed schedule can absorb turnovers with far less notice, and the community becomes a route rather than a series of separate jobs. It also means one point of contact, one scope document and one invoice.
The turnover work itself is rental property make-ready: an empty unit, cabinet and appliance interiors, closet floors, window tracks, and whatever the make-ready checklist names. Where a community has its own checklist, we work to that document rather than ours.
For portfolios spanning several communities, this sits under property management cleaning, where the scope is standardized across properties so a regional manager gets the same result at every site.
Questions
Multi-family questions
- Do you clean occupied units?
- Not as part of a common area contract. Residents book their own apartment cleaning directly, which is a separate residential service. What a community contract covers is common areas, amenity space, back of house and — where agreed — vacant unit turnovers.
- Can you handle turnovers at short notice?
- Far more easily when we are already on the property on a recurring schedule, because the community is a route rather than a separate trip. That is the practical argument for putting common areas and turnovers with one vendor. The hard constraint is always the same: the unit has to be genuinely empty before an empty-property clean can start.
- Our trash room smells and nothing seems to fix it.
- Almost always the drain and the compactor surround rather than the visible floor. Organic residue collects at the drain and under the compactor skirt where a mop never reaches, and it keeps producing odor after the room looks clean. It needs the drain cleared and flushed and the surround scrubbed on a named frequency — not deodorizer, which masks it for a day.
- How is a common area contract priced?
- From the areas and the frequency, after a walk-through — not from unit count. Two communities with 250 units each can differ enormously depending on whether circulation is interior corridors or exterior breezeways, how many stair cores there are, and how much amenity space exists. We walk it, write the scope, then price it.
- Do you provide insurance documents for our management company?
- Yes. We are bonded and insured and can supply a certificate naming your management entity. Give us the exact entity name and address required — the most common delay in setting up a multi-family contract is a certificate issued to a slightly wrong entity name.
Managing an apartment community in Fort Worth?
We walk the property, write the scope area by area with a frequency against each, and price that. Turnovers can sit on the same arrangement so a busy month does not become a scramble.
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