Building washing in Melbourne covers a lot more than the glass. When a body corporate or a centre manager asks us to quote a building, we are usually pricing the render, the entry, the undercroft car park, the loading dock and the balcony balustrades as separate parts of one job, each with its own method. Some of it takes high pressure. Most of the tall stuff does not. They end up as separate services on one quote.
What building washing in Melbourne actually covers
Walk a commercial site and the dirt sorts itself into groups. Traffic film and diesel soot on anything facing a main road, mould and algae on the shaded southern elevations, oil and rubber in the car park and at the dock. Near the bay there is salt haze over the top of all of it, plus bird mess under the ledges and gum across the entry.
Each needs a different chemical and a different amount of force, which is why a single price for the whole building rarely holds up. We break the site into zones and quote the cleaning services zone by zone, so a strata committee can see what they are paying for and drop services out of the scope if the budget is tight this year.
Rendered and painted facades get a soft wash
Render, painted concrete, panel cladding and a lot of precast will not take high pressure. Render is porous, so the mould has grown into it rather than sitting on it. Blasting gouges the finish and leaves shadow marks that show worse than the original dirt, and the growth comes back anyway.
Those elevations get treated at low pressure with a solution left to dwell, then rinsed. It is the same approach we use on a home, scaled up and worked from a platform or ropes. Exterior house washing and a rendered facade twelve levels up are the same chemistry, only the access is different. It is slower, and it is the one method that leaves the facade intact.
Bare concrete, brick, stone and steel are different, and the best approach there depends on the material rather than the height. Those we can clean with real force where the grime warrants it, which on a road facing elevation it usually does.
Hard surfaces: car parks, docks and entries
The ground floor is where the machines earn their keep. Undercroft car parks and open decks hold years of oil, tyre rubber, dust and whatever leaks out of a delivery van, and they need a degreaser down before pressure will shift any of it, and giving the degreaser time to work is more effective than turning the pressure up. We run a surface cleaner across the flat bays so the finish is even instead of striped with wand marks.
Loading docks are worse and need doing more often, particularly where food waste or bin juice has been sitting. Bin rooms and the pad around them matter more for pest control than for looks.
Entries, footpaths and paved forecourts are half the impression a visitor forms of a site. Gum removal is slow work and gets quoted by the square metre or by the hour, since the number of spots varies wildly between a suburban office and a strip of shopfronts. Heat and patience is the effective way through it, and the footpath ends up safe to walk on.
Balconies, ledges and the parts nobody looks at
On residential towers the balcony soffits, balustrades and the ledges above the entry collect more than people expect. Dust settles, birds nest, and the underside of a balcony above a car park picks up exhaust film a tenant never notices.
Whether those services sit inside the owners corporation scope or with individual lot owners is worth settling before we quote. Common property is straightforward. Anything inside the line of a private balcony usually needs the committee to make a call, and we would rather that happened before the truck is booked.
Access and safety
Access decides the price of commercial cleaning services more than the amount of dirt does. Ropes, a boom lift or scissor lift, a swing stage or a water fed pole from ground level are all viable, and the right one depends on the height, the roof anchors, the ground conditions and what is parked below.
Every one of those brings a safety requirement with it. Anchor points need to be certified and in date so a crew has a safe tie off. Ground floor work under a crew on a lift needs exclusion zones and spotters, especially on a footpath. Our crews are work at heights certified, we carry public liability insurance, and the paperwork comes with the quote. If your building has a site induction, tell us at quoting stage so it goes into the schedule.
Water is the other thing to sort early. Where the runoff goes, whether the site has a trade waste requirement and which taps we can use all change how a job is planned, so it is worth a phone call first.
Scheduling around trading hours
The best time to clean a commercial building is when nobody is trying to use it. Retail sites we do before opening or after close. Offices generally suit a weekend, with a run sheet to the building manager so nobody walks through a wet foyer on Monday.
Anything over an entry, an awning or a footpath needs a plan for pedestrians, and on a busy shopping strip that often means starting early rather than fighting the foot traffic. Sites with medical or aged care tenants have their own restrictions on noise and access times, and those get sorted before the booking.
Post construction and builders cleaning
A new build or a refurbishment leaves its own set of marks: render splatter, mortar smears, silicone, adhesive labels, concrete slurry and dust in every track and reveal. Post construction services are a different job to a maintenance clean, and each material needs a removal method that is safe for the finish underneath it.
Glass is where builders cleaning gets expensive if it is done badly. Scraping dried render off a coated pane with the wrong blade damages the coating, and the panel gets replaced at someone’s cost.
The services a site usually needs
Most commercial cleaning services quotes cover some mix of the same items. A managing agent often takes all of them on one schedule. A shopfront tenant might only want the first two.
- Glass and frames, inside and out.
- Entry doors, awnings and signage.
- Facade cleaning, soft or pressure depending on the material.
- Car park decks, ramps and the loading dock.
- Footpaths, forecourts and gum removal.
- Balcony soffits, ledges and balustrades.
- Post construction cleans on new build and refurbishment projects.
Where a site already has internal cleaning services under contract, we work around them and report to the same building manager. That keeps the exterior services on one schedule instead of three.
Getting a price for your site
Send through the address, the number of levels and what the elevations are made from. Wide shots of each elevation plus close ups of the problem areas are the best thing you can attach. For a group of buildings under one owner or one managing agent, we will quote the services together and set up a schedule so they do not all fall due in the same month.
Most commercial quotes need a site visit, and we will usually get there within the week. Call 03 8682 8767, or send photos through and we will tell you what we can price off them. Regular glass services are quoted separately as commercial window cleaning Melbourne sites usually book monthly or quarterly, and the hard surface work sits under pressure washing. For the walls of a home, see house washing.