Condo cleaning for people who live vertically

A large share of what we clean is condos and apartments, mostly downtown, in Liberty Village, CityPlace, King West, the Entertainment District and Yorkville. The work is different from a house and we price and staff it differently.

In a 600 square foot unit there is nowhere to hide dust. Every surface is visible from every other surface, which means the standard is higher, not lower.

We already know your building's rules

Most downtown buildings want cleaners signed in at the desk, some want paperwork on file with property management, and a few restrict service elevator use to booked windows. Some will not release a fob to a third party at all and need the resident to authorise access in writing.

Give us your building and unit when you book and we handle the access side. You should not have to project-manage your own cleaner past a concierge.

The things condos actually need

Balcony door tracks, which collect a surprising amount of grit and are almost never cleaned. The range hood filter above a stove with no exterior venting. Hard-water film on a glass shower enclosure, which is close to universal in Toronto. In-suite laundry, where lint and detergent residue build up behind and under the machines. And the high horizontal surfaces where forced-air heating deposits fine dust.

Short-term rentals and investor units

If your condo is tenanted or on a short-term platform, see Airbnb turnover cleaning, which is a different service with a different clock: same-day turnarounds, linen changes and a restock check.

Why small units are harder than they look

The instinct is that a 600 square foot condo is a quarter of the work of a 2,400 square foot house. It is not, and pricing that assumes it produces a bad clean.

Almost all of the labour in a home is concentrated in the kitchen and bathrooms, and a one bedroom condo has one of each just as a house does. The bits that genuinely scale with floor area, vacuuming and washing floors, are the fastest part of the visit. So a condo is perhaps half the work of a large house rather than a quarter, which is exactly how the pricing model treats it: a base that covers the rooms that matter, plus a smaller adjustment for size.

The other reason is sightlines. In an open-plan unit you see the kitchen from the sofa and the balcony door from the bed. A smudge that would go unnoticed in a house is the only thing you look at in a condo.

Buildings we work in regularly

Most of our condo work sits in a fairly tight footprint: the towers through Liberty Village and King West, CityPlace and Fort York, the Entertainment and Financial Districts across downtown, the older luxury stock in Yorkville, and the Yonge corridor up through Yonge and Eglinton and into North York.

That concentration is deliberate rather than a limit. Working a tight radius is what makes it possible to keep a consistent cleaner on your unit and to hold a flat rate, because we are not paying for an hour of driving between jobs. If you are outside it, call and ask rather than assuming.

Access, honestly

Condo access is the single most common reason a first clean goes wrong, and almost always because it was arranged the morning of rather than in advance.

The three arrangements that work: you leave a fob and give us the buzzer code, you install a lockbox where the building permits it, or you authorise concierge key release in writing with property management. The one that does not work is assuming the desk will let a stranger up because you mentioned it once on the phone.

Whichever you choose is recorded on your file, so you explain it once and never again. If your building changes its rules, tell us and we adjust rather than turning up and discovering it.