Building Cleaning in Geneva

What actually generates complaints from residents?

The experience of Geneva managing agents — the régies — is consistent on this point: complaints almost never concern the cleanliness of the entrance hall, which is the most visible area and therefore the best maintained. They concern three far more prosaic things.

The first is the bin room: smells, overflowing containers, bags left on the floor, a floor not cleaned after a leak. It is the space every resident walks through daily and it generates the most correspondence. The second is putting bins out: a container not presented the evening before a collection creates an overflow that lasts the whole week, and one not brought back obstructs the pavement. The third is the lift — floor, walls, mirror, buttons — because everyone spends several minutes a day looking at the same surfaces.

That hierarchy has a direct consequence for how a contract should be built. A contract that optimises the hall and neglects the bin room will produce more complaints than a less ambitious one that holds the collection calendar. It is why we always ask for the collection days before issuing a quote: they determine how the visits are scheduled, not the other way round.

What does a common-area specification actually contain?

The quality of a building contract is measured by the precision of its specification, not by the number of visits announced. A useful document distinguishes three frequency tiers for the same premises, because not everything needs the same rhythm.

At every visit: entrance hall, floor and touched surfaces, letterboxes, the complete lift, the stairwell over its full height, handrails, landings, bin room and container handling according to the collection calendar. These are the items whose absence is visible within twenty-four hours.

Periodically: common-area glazing and glazed doors, light fittings, ventilation grilles, skirting boards and corners, basement and cellar corridors, bicycle and pram stores, laundry room, garage doors. And annually or twice yearly: floor treatment appropriate to the covering, washing down stairwell walls, cleaning accessible service ducts. That last tier is the one the cheapest contracts quietly remove, and its absence only becomes apparent after about a year.

How can you tell whether the visits actually happened?

This is the weak point of most caretaking contracts and the most frequent source of dispute between an agent and a contractor. When a resident writes that the cleaning did not come this week, nobody can confirm or deny it and the discussion becomes a matter of impressions.

Traceability solves that and protects both parties. Concretely: each visit is time-stamped, the visit record stays accessible in the building for residents, and periodic tasks are dated separately from per-visit ones. A managing agent can then answer a complaint with a date rather than a promise to check.

It also changes the nature of the contractual relationship. A contractor who accepts being measured accepts that shortfalls become visible; one who refuses traceability is implicitly asking to be believed for years. For a condominium board — in Switzerland a PPE, propriété par étages — that has to account to its co-owners, that difference weighs more than a few percent on the fee.

Full caretaking or common-area cleaning?

The two terms are used interchangeably although they describe very different scopes, and the confusion is expensive when offers are compared.

Common-area cleaning is a maintenance service: it covers the cleanliness of shared surfaces at a defined frequency. It carries no supervision or minor-maintenance duties. That is the service we provide, and it covers the essential needs of a standard residential building.

Full caretaking adds duties of a different nature: meter readings, changing light bulbs, reporting and following up faults, receiving deliveries, opening up for contractors, sometimes attendance on site at fixed hours. Those duties belong to another trade and often to a different contractual status. We would rather state clearly where our scope ends than promise full caretaking and deliver cleaning — which produces exactly the kind of disappointment managing agents complain about.

How are bins and waste handled?

This is the most structuring item in the schedule and the one demanding the most discipline, because it depends on an external calendar nobody controls: the municipal collection rounds.

The service has three parts. Presenting the containers the evening before or the morning of collection according to local practice, bringing them back once the vehicle has passed, and cleaning the room itself — floor, walls, drainage gully where one exists, periodic disinfection. In Geneva the days and the waste streams vary from one commune to the next and sometimes from one district to another: household waste, paper and card, glass, organic waste, and bulky items on request.

Sorting is the other difficulty, and it is human rather than technical. A paper container holding bags of household waste can be refused at collection, which blocks the stream for a whole week. We report those situations to the managing agent rather than silently correcting them, because persistently poor sorting is solved by communicating with residents, not by a contractor re-sorting every week without anyone knowing.

What happens during absences or emergencies?

On a recurring contract, continuity matters more than the performance of any single visit. A building whose maintenance stops for two weeks in August produces more dissatisfaction than one maintained adequately all year without particular brilliance.

Continuity requires two things. First an organised replacement: the stand-in receives the building's written specification rather than verbal instructions, which prevents a periodic task disappearing over the holidays. Second, informing the managing agent when the regular cleaner changes on a lasting basis, rather than a silent change discovered by residents.

Emergencies are a different matter: water damage in a stairwell, bags dumped outside the containers, a broken pane, heavy soiling after a move-out. Those interventions fall outside the monthly fee and are quoted separately, but they have to be possible quickly — a building whose emergency waits for the next scheduled visit is a building whose managing agent will receive letters.

Rented building, condominium or mixed use?

The type of ownership changes the technical service less than it changes how the contract is written and reported on, and that is worth anticipating.

On a rented building managed by a régie, there is a single point of contact and decisions are quick. The objective is reducing the volume of complaints and demonstrable compliance with the specification, because that is what the agent has to show the owner.

On a condominium, decisions pass through a board and often a general meeting: the quote has to be readable by non-professionals, comparable with other offers, and the monitoring has to produce material that can be presented at a meeting. That is precisely where traceable visits acquire practical value. On a mixed building with a commercial ground floor the difficulty is different again: waste volumes are higher, visit times have to work around trading hours, and the scope actually covered must line up with how service charges are apportioned between residential and commercial.

How do you compare two building maintenance quotes?

A monthly fee in isolation means nothing: it is comparable only alongside the scope and the frequency. Six elements should appear in any offer, and their absence is more informative than the figure.

The exact visit frequency, distinguishing per-visit from periodic and annual work. The scope named room by room, including basement, bin room, bicycle store, laundry and approaches. Bin handling, with the commune's collection calendar mentioned. The common-area glazing, with its frequency. Snow clearing and seasonal upkeep of the approaches. And traceability: how the agent or the board can verify that a visit took place.

One further point, less obvious: what happens when the scope changes. A bicycle store created, a commercial unit let, a lift installed all change the real workload. An honest contract provides for revision tied to a change of scope, rather than automatic indexation unrelated to the work performed — the latter being considerably harder to justify to a body of co-owners.

Who does what: agent, caretaker, residents

We always ask that the bin room and putting the bins out be settled in the quote. Those are the two lines contracts leave vague, and they are exactly the ones that generate resident complaints a few months later.