Ask three vendors to price the same Peachtree Road tower floor and you will get three different pages. That is confusing, and it should not be. The commercial cleaning cost Buckhead managers try to compare is built out of a handful of plain inputs, and once you know them, a stack of proposals stops looking like guesswork. We will not put a figure in this article, because a real number comes from standing in your building. What we can hand you is the list of things that move that number up or down, so you can read any bid on your desk and tell whether the person who wrote it ever looked at your floors.

Rentable feet and cleanable feet are two different numbers

Your lease says one thing. Your mop says another. Elevator shafts, structural columns, mechanical rooms and stairwell cores all sit inside rentable area, and none of them get cleaned nightly.

A bid priced off the lease number is priced off fiction. Ask any vendor which figure they used. If they cannot tell you, they used whatever you emailed them.

Why commercial cleaning cost Buckhead bids swing so widely

Two proposals can look far apart and both be honest. One assumed carpet vacuumed every visit, the other assumed spot vacuuming with a full pass twice a week. Same building, different labor.

Frequency, area counted, restroom fixture count and floor type are the four dials. Change any one and the page changes. Nobody is lying. They are answering different questions.

Access rules in a tower are part of the workload

Buildings around Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza run on overnight windows, freight elevators and a certificate of insurance on file before anyone swipes in. That is fine. It is also time.

A crew that waits twenty minutes for a freight car on every trip is a crew doing less cleaning per hour. BOMA building operations guidance treats access and service coordination as core building operations for exactly that reason.

Here is the part most proposals skip. Cleaning usually gets sold on a rate per square foot and then staffed by whoever came in lowest that month, which is why quality slides around month two. We write the scope after walking the building on the hours you actually run, then send back the same crew who learned it.

Most commercial cleaning gets sold on price per square foot, then quietly handed to whoever was cheapest and free that night. That’s why quality slides after month two — the scope was never real to begin with. We build yours from an actual walkthrough of your actual building, on your actual hours. Then we send the same crew who learned it. Boring? Completely. It’s also the only thing that makes month five look like month one.

DBS Cleaning Services Group

Stone lobbies change the math over years, not weeks

Marble, terrazzo and polished stone in a Garden Hills or Peachtree Park lobby need periodic restoration on a cycle, not a mop and a hope. That work belongs in the scope with a stated interval.

Leave it out and the base number looks lighter. Two years later the lobby looks tired and the repair costs more attention than the maintenance ever would have.

Frequently asked questions