"How long will the clean take?" is the most common question we get, and most answers online are useless because they quote a single number for jobs that vary by a factor of fifty. Here are the numbers we actually run, from 801+ handovers, and the five things that move them.
The base numbers
These assume power and water on, trades out of the areas being cleaned, and normal levels of construction soiling.
A 2 bedroom apartment. Crew of 2, about one full day for the detail clean. The sparkle pass closer to handover is a half day. If the glazing carries paint overspray or the bathrooms have grout haze, add a half day.
A 4 bedroom custom home. Crew of 3 to 4, two to three days for the detail, one day for the sparkle. Pools, outdoor kitchens, cabanas and big glazing lines all add time, and prestige builds run slower on purpose because the finishes punish rushing.
A 24 unit residential build. Two to three weeks end to end, but not two to three weeks of continuous cleaning. Rough cleans land between trades through the program, the detail clean runs floor by floor over one to two weeks, and sparkle passes are sequenced against settlement dates.
A 32 level tower. Programs, not days. Floor by floor closeout over one to three months depending on how settlements are staged, with facade and glazing running as its own stream on EWP access.
The five things that move the number
1. Whether the trades are actually finished. The single biggest variable. If painters are still touching up through a floor we are detailing, every touched surface gets cleaned twice and the program slips. A clean sequenced properly behind the trades runs at full speed.
2. Glass. Glazing is the slowest surface on a construction clean. Render splash, silicone smear and label adhesive have to be scraped, washed and squeegeed pane by pane. A home with walls of glass cleans slower than a bigger home without them.
3. Services. No power means no vacuums and no hot water. No water means nothing washes. It sounds obvious, and it still costs sites a day more often than any other single cause.
4. Access. If the facade needs an EWP that was never booked, the external glazing waits. We book access equipment when we book the clean, but only if the scope told us it was needed.
5. The state of the site. A rough clean partway through the program keeps dust from compounding. Sites that skip rough cleans pay for it at the end, because the detail clean is fighting months of buildup instead of weeks.
How to block it into your program
Work backwards from practical completion. The sparkle pass goes in the last two days before handover. The detail clean goes behind your last detail trade, usually the week before that. Rough cleans land where the program has natural breaks between wet trades and fitout.
Then get your cleaning contractor on site for a walk three weeks out. Ten minutes of walking a floor tells us more than any plan, and it means the days we quote are the days the program actually needs.
Send plans or a short video walkthrough and we will come back inside 24 hours with an itemised scope, staged against your program, with the durations priced in.
On multi residential builds the handover clean is not the end of it. Once the owners corporation takes over, the lobby, lifts, corridors and bin rooms need doing every week from then on, which is strata cleaning, a different scope on a different schedule.
The Builders Clean team