A building with three hundred owners and one shared lobby creates a strange kind of ownership, where everyone has a stake in how the entrance looks but no single person holds responsibility for it. This is the fault line running through most strata cleaning arrangements, and it explains why so many committees cycle through providers without solving the underlying problem. The industry tends to frame strata cleaning as a technical challenge, a matter of frequency and chemical selection, when the harder problem sits somewhere else entirely: strata is a governance structure wearing the costume of a cleaning contract.
Troy Stahlhut, executive manager at Associated Cleaning, sees this play out in the approval process long before it shows up in the quality of the clean. “Most strata schemes and body corporates require asset management expenditure, including cleaning, to be approved by the committee, which can significantly slow things down when additional or reactive cleaning services are needed,” he says. His solution is to remove that friction before it becomes a problem, building a detailed cleaning management plan that aligns with the committee’s budget and pre-agrees likely areas of future work. “That way, when something arises, the approval pathway already exists.”
Governance, not cleaning, is the real problem
Logic Resources CEO Lorraine Rogic goes further, arguing that the entire premise of judging strata cleaning as a service quality issue is misplaced. “The biggest challenge is governance, not cleaning,” she says. “A single business client offers one decision-maker with continuity and a clear line of authority, whereas a strata committee is structurally different by design.” In New South Wales, committee members are elected fresh at each annual general meeting and typically serve one-year terms, so the people who sign off a cleaning scope this year are not reliably the people reviewing it twelve months later. “That isn’t a breakdown in communication, it’s the governance model working as designed,” Rogic says, adding that agreed decisions get re-litigated by members who were not part of the original discussion, forcing contractors to re-justify a service level annually rather than being judged on how well they are delivering it.
Authority compounds the problem. Under New South Wales strata law, the owners corporation holds ultimate decision-making power, and the committee only has whatever day-to-day authority has been delegated to it, unable to make decisions reserved for a general meeting or special resolution. Spending limits are not standardised across buildings, which means the answer to who can actually approve a variation changes from scheme to scheme and is rarely made clear to the contractor before a dispute arises. Layered on top of that is a further complication Rogic describes as a lack of a single definition of success, with contractors often answering to dozens or hundreds of owners rather than one authorised representative, each carrying their own idea of what a clean building looks like. “Most strata cleaning disputes are ultimately accountability disputes,” she says. “The committee assumes the contractor should have done more, while the contractor believes they delivered exactly what was contracted.”
Rethinking the contract as a communication tool
The strongest strata cleaning relationships tend to share a feature that has nothing to do with mop heads or chemical grade, and Stahlhut is direct about what that feature is. “We deliberately avoid trying to communicate with every interested party, as in our experience that creates confusion and misalignment around the scope,” he says. Associated Cleaning instead builds a structured feedback loop through a single point of contact, typically a facilities manager or property manager who understands the contract and its boundaries. “Too many competing opinions can actually be damaging to an effective cleaning program, so a single, informed conduit protects both the committee and the outcome.”
Rogic frames the same instinct in more formal terms, describing it as governance reporting rather than customer service. Verbal updates and informal conversations get lost the moment committee membership turns over, which happens at least annually by design, so reporting needs to be written, concise, factual and understandable to someone with no prior context, because eventually someone with no prior context will read it.
In her view, a short standing report at a fixed frequency, timed to committee meetings, should cover services delivered against the agreed scope, and should also detail issues identified and how they were resolved. It should record complaints received and their outcome alongside outstanding matters that require a decision from the committee.
Beyond that record of what has happened, the report should look ahead, setting out recommended variations to the scope and the reasons behind them. It should also flag emerging risks or changes in building use that might affect service requirements, so the committee is working from the same picture the contractor sees on site.
Where possible, that report should go through the strata manager rather than whichever owner happens to be chair that month, since strata managing agents are themselves required to report to the owners corporation, meaning a contractor reporting on a regular cycle is working with the grain of how strata governance already operates. “The objective is to create institutional memory,” Rogic says. “In a strata environment, good documentation is often more important than good verbal communication because documentation survives committee turnover.”
A governance problem beyond residential strata
A similar imbalance turns up in property types that have nothing to do with owners’ corporations, as John Taylor, an advisor at Nivernais Pty Ltd, found while guiding a cleaning contractor through a quote for a small suburban shopping centre. The site had around ten tenants and a dominant supermarket anchor trading from seven in the morning until ten at night, overseen by a managing agent with limited shopping centre experience who, in Taylor’s account, had little choice but to defer to the anchor tenant’s demands. The parallel with strata is direct: an agent acting on behalf of an owner, answering to a stakeholder whose interests do not always match the owner’s, and a cleaning contractor caught in the middle of that dynamic. Taylor also pushed the contractor toward a technical change with a governance payoff, replacing a strip, seal and buff routine on the centre’s terrazzo floors with diamond-infused pads, a switch that let the floors be maintained during quiet trading hours rather than adding to the out-of-hours bill. His broader advice to the contractor centred on documentation: recording every inspection, every sweep of the centre for spills and litter, and every conversation with the managing agent. “It stops the he says, she says argument,” Taylor says. “It all gets back to being close to your client, whether they be a managing agent or a strata committee. Presume nothing.”
Why scope reviews rarely happen on schedule
Stahlhut’s practice is to schedule a full review ninety days after a contract begins, by which point the team has learned the building’s usage patterns and foot traffic, followed by a further review at the twelve-month mark, with additional reviews triggered by material change rather than the calendar. Common triggers, he says, include a rise or fall in occupancy or facility usage, the age, deterioration and maintenance condition of assets, shifts in committee expectations, or budgetary changes.
Rogic’s experience suggests that structured schedule is the exception rather than the rule. Most scopes are agreed at contract commencement and then left alone until something forces the conversation, whether an owner complaint, a change in building use, increased common-area traffic, growth in short-term letting, a safety incident, a hygiene issue, budget pressure or a new committee member questioning the price of the contract. She is careful to separate two distinct problems that get treated as one: a contractor may be delivering exactly what was specified while resident expectations have moved on without the scope being updated to match, making dissatisfaction almost inevitable even where the contractor is technically performing to the letter of the agreement.
There is also, she points out, no legislative requirement to review a cleaning scope in the first place. Unlike some of the financial and reporting obligations imposed on strata schemes, scope review is a private contractual matter, and whether it happens on a schedule or only in response to a crisis depends entirely on what is written into the contract or whether the strata manager has built it into their own governance processes.
A better conversation, not a better mop
There is a broader lesson here for anyone selling services into strata, or indeed any multi-stakeholder property, not just cleaning. The client is not a person but a process, and the contract that wins repeat business is the one that accounts for how that process actually works: rotating committees, dominant tenants, levy sensitivity, and an audience that notices results without ever seeing the schedule or the paperwork behind them. Rogic’s closing observation captures where the industry needs to move. “The best strata schemes treat cleaning not simply as a presentation service but as part of asset preservation, risk management and resident amenity,” she says. “Once cleaning is viewed through that broader governance lens, the conversation shifts from is the cleaner doing their job, to does the contract still reflect what the building actually needs.” Stahlhut’s approach of building the approval pathway in advance and centralising communication, Taylor’s insistence on documenting everything, and Rogic’s case for structurally triggered review, all point to the same conclusion. The opportunity for the sector is not a better mop. It is a better conversation, backed by a paper trail and a clause that survives committee turnover, with the people who hold the purse strings but rarely hold the keys.
