Cleaning a Shop Inside a Shopping Centre: What the Centre Does and What You Pay For

A new tenant in a shopping centre often assumes the centre's cleaners will look after the shop. They see a team in uniform working the mall every morning and take it as part of the rent. Then the first month goes by, the shopfront glass is covered in fingerprints, and nobody has touched the floor behind the counter.

The centre's cleaners are cleaning the centre. Your tenancy is your job. Here is where the line usually falls, what the centre will ask of your cleaner, and how to set it up so nothing falls through the gap.

Where the centre's cleaning stops

Every centre is slightly different, so check your lease and the centre's tenancy handbook. But the split almost always looks like this.

The centre looks after the common areas:

Mall floors and walkways, up to your lease line.
Shared toilets, parents' rooms and the food court.
Escalators, lifts, car parks and entrances to the centre.
Common bins in the mall and the centre's main waste and recycling compound.

You look after your tenancy:

Everything inside the lease line: floors, fixtures, displays, counters and fitting rooms.
Your shopfront glass and door, usually inside and out at the levels a person can reach. Check this one. Some centres clean the outside of tenancy glass on a cycle, most don't.
Your back-of-house: stockroom, staff room, staff toilet if you have one, and any tenancy kitchen.
Getting your rubbish and cardboard to the centre's waste area, sorted the way the centre asks.

The cost of the common-area cleaning is normally recovered through outgoings in your lease. That is part of why the line matters. You are already paying for the mall. You don't want to pay twice for a cleaner who mops it, and you don't want a gap where nobody mops the strip just inside your door.

We explained the same idea for office buildings in base building vs tenancy cleaning. Shopping centres work the same way.

What centre management will ask of your cleaner

Centres manage contractors closely, because they are responsible for safety and security across the whole site. Before your cleaner's first visit, expect centre management to want some or all of the following:

Public liability insurance at the level the centre sets, with a certificate of currency naming the centre or its owner.
A centre induction for each cleaner, online or in person, before they work on site.
Sign-in and sign-out at the management office, security desk or loading dock on every visit.
Approved access times. Many centres only let tenancy contractors in at set hours before opening or after closing, through a particular entry.
Safe work method statements for anything beyond routine cleaning, such as floor machines or ladders.
Chemical safety data sheets for the products used, and sometimes a list of products the centre doesn't allow.
Waste rules: which bins, which hours for the waste compound, and how cardboard must be flattened and stacked.

The easiest way through is to ask centre management for their contractor pack the day you sign the lease, and pass it straight to your cleaner. A cleaner who has worked in centres will ask for it anyway. One who hasn't will find out on the first night, at the security desk.

Fitting cleaning into centre hours

In a street-front shop you can choose when the cleaner comes. In a centre, the centre's access rules choose for you. That has a few knock-on effects.

After close is usually the default. Most centres allow tenancy contractors in for a period after trading ends. That suits a full clean of floors and fixtures, because the floors dry overnight.

Late-night trading moves the window. Thursday and Friday late nights, and the extended hours from November through to Christmas, push the start time back. A cleaner booked for 6pm on a Thursday may not get in until after 9pm. Agree in advance how the schedule changes on those nights, rather than finding out on the night.

Before open is tighter. Morning access in a centre often runs only an hour or two before the doors open. It works for a quick check of the glass, the entry and the counter, not for mopping a whole floor.

Security has to know who is coming. A cleaner whose name isn't on the centre's list can be turned away. When a regular cleaner is sick, the relief cleaner needs to be inducted and listed too. Ask your provider how they handle that before it happens.

The gaps we see most

The strip inside the door. The mall cleaner stops at the lease line, the tenancy cleaner starts a metre inside it. Make sure the scope says the cleaner does the floor right up to the shopfront.

The outside of the glass. Kids' handprints on the outside of the window are the first thing a customer sees. If the centre doesn't clean it, put it in your scope.

Cardboard. Deliveries pile up out the back, and centres fine tenants for leaving cardboard in the wrong place. Decide who flattens it and takes it to the compound, and how often.

The staff toilet and kitchen. Back-of-house gets forgotten because customers don't see it. Your staff do.

Write the line down

The fix for nearly all of this is a written scope that names the boundary: what the centre does, what your cleaner does, and the access times and rules your cleaner works under. Our post on what a regular retail contract should cover lists the tasks, and the office cleaning scope of works template adapts easily to a shop.

How we work in centres

Our cleaners sign in and out of every visit on our app inside a geofence around your store, with a photo, on top of whatever sign-in the centre runs. You can see the visit happened without asking anyone. If something is missed, you raise it in our client portal and follow it through to the fix.

We have local teams in every state and territory, so a retailer with stores in several centres can have one scope and one point of contact across them. See our locations, or ask for a quote and send us your centre's contractor requirements with it. Our commercial cleaning page explains how we work with retail.