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Bankstown NSW 2200

Base building and tenancy cleaning arriving separately in Bankstown offices

Two cleaning services turn up at a Bankstown office building. One is engaged by the building owner and works the lobby, lifts and shared amenities. The other is engaged by the tenant and works inside the suite. Neither can answer a question about the other's area.

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In short

In most multi-tenanted Bankstown buildings, the base building service covers the entrance, lift lobbies, common corridors, shared amenities and external areas under the owner's or owners corporation's agreement, while the tenancy service covers everything inside the demise under the occupier's own separate contract with its own scope.

Clean Best can hold either agreement or both. Where it holds both, the scopes stay separate and each is reported to the party who engaged it, so a tenant is never charged for base building work and the building is never charged for one tenancy's particular requirements.

The demise line is the whole answer

Almost every question about who cleans what resolves back to a single line drawn in the lease or the strata plan. Inside it is the occupier's responsibility, outside it belongs to the base building and is funded by the owner or the scheme. The trouble is that the line is a legal one rather than a visual one, and in a fitted-out floor it can run straight through the middle of a space that looks entirely continuous to anyone standing in it.

Facilities officers new to a building are the ones most often caught out by this. They assume the shared corridor on their floor is theirs because their staff are the only people who ever use it, or they assume the shared amenities are somebody else's because they sit outside the front door. Reading the demarcation before writing a scope prevents both mistakes and takes a small fraction of the time that unpicking them later does.

Civic and government tenancies add a second set of rules

A tenancy operating a public counter, a records area or a restricted zone brings access and clearance conditions that the base building service knows nothing about and has no way of applying. Those conditions apply inside the demise and are the tenant's to specify and enforce. Expecting the building's cleaner to observe them is unrealistic, because that contractor answers to a different client working from an entirely different scope document.

Keeping the two arrangements separate is exactly what makes both of them workable. The tenancy scope can carry induction, escorting and restricted-area rules in as much detail as the occupier requires without complicating anything else, while the base building scope stays simple and consistent across every floor of the building. Attempts to merge them usually produce one long document that satisfies neither party and gets followed by nobody.

When something falls in the gap

Every building has items that neither scope actually names. A shared kitchenette on a part-let floor, a fire stair used only by one tenancy, a store room off a corridor that nobody has opened in a year. They are cleaned by nobody until somebody complains, and then they are cleaned by whoever is asked first, which quietly sets an unhelpful precedent about who is going to pay for it from then on.

The remedy is a short list, agreed once, of the items in question and which side of the line takes them. It does not need to be elegant or long. It needs to exist, and it needs to be attached to both scopes so that a change of contractor or a change of tenant does not reopen the whole question. Clean Best raises these items at the walkthrough rather than discovering them in month three of the agreement.

Demarcation points for a Bankstown office building

  • The demise line confirmed against the lease or strata plan
  • Shared corridors and lobbies allocated to one scope
  • Amenities on part-let floors assigned in writing
  • Restricted areas listed with their access conditions
  • A named contact for each of the two agreements
  • An agreed list of items that fall between the scopes
Clean Best supervisor reviewing office and strata cleaning quality in Parramatta NSW

Working in Bankstown and the Canterbury-Bankstown

Bankstown in Canterbury-Bankstown holds offices, healthcare, retail, education and civic buildings, with a commercial centre where several tenancies commonly share one building and one entrance. Public-facing and administrative uses often sit on different floors of the same address, each with its own access rules, its own visitor pattern and its own view of what the shared areas ought to look like. The building owner funds the shared parts and the tenants fund their own, and the line between them is rarely obvious from the corridor. Clean Best services Bankstown from Seven Hills and keeps base building and tenancy scopes as two documents even where one contractor holds both.

Questions about Bankstown

Our lobby looks tired but we only lease one floor. Who do we ask?

The building owner, the owners corporation or the building manager, depending on how the building is held. A tenant cannot vary a base building scope directly because it is funded and controlled by another party entirely. A written request describing specifically what you are seeing, sent to the correct contact, is considerably more effective than raising it with whichever cleaner you happen to see in the lift.

Can one contractor hold both agreements?

Yes, and it removes a great deal of duplicated access, induction and coordination effort. The two scopes still stay separate with their own pricing and their own reporting, and each is answerable to the party who engaged it. That separation is precisely what stops base building costs drifting quietly into a tenancy invoice, or a tenant's special requirement being funded by the building.

Who cleans a shared amenity on a floor we half occupy?

It depends entirely on how the building is documented, and it is one of the most common items to fall between two scopes. The practical step is to have the building manager and the tenancy agree it in writing once and attach the answer to both documents. Left unresolved, it gets done inconsistently, billed inconsistently, and argued about every time either contract is renewed.

We have restricted rooms. How is that handled?

Restricted areas are listed in the tenancy scope along with the access conditions the occupier requires, including whether the room is cleaned at all, whether escorting is needed and who holds the key. Nothing is assumed or left to the shift. Where a room is excluded entirely, the scope says so plainly so that nobody later believes it was covered and finds out otherwise.

Does the base building service include our kitchen?

Usually not, if the kitchen sits inside the demise. Kitchens located in shared lobbies or on common floors are much more likely to be base building. Because the answer changes from building to building, it is worth confirming against the demarcation rather than guessing from the layout. Clean Best raises it at the walkthrough so it is settled before anyone puts a price on the work.

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