Base Building or Tenancy? Who Cleans What in a Melbourne Office Building

Lease an office floor in the CBD, Southbank or St Kilda Road and you will probably have two cleaners in the building: the landlord's, cleaning the base building, and yours, cleaning the tenancy. Most of the time they never meet. The trouble starts when nobody is sure which of them owns the bathroom on your floor, the lift lobby outside your door, or the bin room in the basement.

Before you ask for a cleaning quote, it is worth knowing where your lease draws the line. Otherwise you can end up paying twice for some areas while nobody cleans others.

What "base building" usually means

The base building is the part of the property the landlord provides and maintains for every tenant. Its cleaning is normally paid for through outgoings, so you are already contributing to it whether you know it or not. In a typical Melbourne commercial building it covers:

Ground-floor lobby, entry and foyer, including the glass and the entry mats
Lifts: cars, doors, buttons and tracks
Fire stairs and common corridors
External windows, on a periodic cycle, often by rope access in towers
Car park, loading dock and bin room
End-of-trip facilities (showers, lockers, bike storage) where the building has them
Base-building bathrooms, in some buildings

Every building is different, and the lease and its outgoings schedule are what count. But that is the usual shape.

What "tenancy" usually means

Everything inside your front door, plus anything the lease says is yours:

Workstations, offices, meeting rooms and breakout areas
Your kitchen and any tea points
Internal glass and partitions
Your floor coverings, including periodic carpet cleaning
Bathrooms inside your tenancy
Your waste, as far as the building's collection point

Where it gets blurry

The bathrooms on your floor. This is the big one. In a whole-floor tenancy, the floor's bathrooms are sometimes base building and sometimes yours. In a split floor shared with other tenants they are usually base building. If the landlord's cleaner already services them every night, your cleaner shouldn't be quoting for them too. Ask your property manager in writing.

The lift lobby on your floor. Often base building on a shared floor and tenancy on a whole floor. Either way it is the first thing your visitors see, so know who owns it.

Consumables. In base-building bathrooms the landlord usually supplies the toilet paper and hand towel. Make sure your cleaner isn't charging you for stock that goes into a room you don't pay to clean.

Waste. Your cleaner takes your bins to a collection point, and the building's contractor takes it away. Agree where that point is and when. Recycling streams are where this tends to go wrong: if your cleaner tips the separated recycling into general waste in the bin room, the separating your staff do all day is wasted.

Access. Base-building security controls when your cleaner can get in, how they get a lift after hours, and whether they need an induction. In a lot of CBD towers the cleaner has to be inducted by building management and carry a building access card. Allow for it in the start date. It can take a week or two.

Questions to put to your property manager

Ask them, in writing:

Which areas on our floor are cleaned by the base-building contractor, and how often?
Who supplies bathroom consumables on our floor?
Where and when do our cleaners drop waste and recycling?
What are the after-hours access rules, and do our cleaners need an induction or a building card?
Are there any restrictions on cleaning chemicals, machines or noise after hours?

Give the answers to every cleaning provider you are getting quotes from. The quotes will then be for the same job.

Writing it into your scope

Your office cleaning scope of work should state the boundary in one line: "Base-building areas (list them) are excluded; the following areas on level X are included." A provider that has never asked about the base building at the walkthrough is likely to be quoting for areas you don't need cleaned, or leaving out ones you do.

When base-building cleaning isn't good enough

Sometimes the honest answer is that the base-building cleaner does the floor's bathrooms, but not well enough for a client-facing office. You can raise it with the property manager, who manages that contract. Or you can ask your own cleaner for a light top-up of those bathrooms on your busy days and pay for it as a separate line. That way, if the building improves, you can drop it.

Proof that your part was done

Whichever side of the line an area falls on, you should be able to see that your cleaner did their part. Every visit we make is signed in and out on our app inside a geofence around the building, with a photo, and a supervisor inspects every three weeks. When a building manager asks who was on your floor at 9 pm on Tuesday, the answer is already on record.

We clean offices from the Melbourne CBD, Southbank and St Kilda Road out to South Yarra and Thomastown. See office cleaning Melbourne for how we work, read what office cleaning in Melbourne costs, or request a quote with your property manager's answers attached.