Comparing your own cleaner against the landlord's in Granville

Common area cleaning is typically recovered through outgoings, which means you are contributing to it whether or not you think about it. Ask the building manager what the arrangement covers: lobby, lifts, stairs, external glass, car park, bin area, and how often each is attended. Getting that in writing is the foundation of the comparison, because it defines the gap your own provider would be filling.

It also prevents duplication. Tenants occasionally engage a provider to clean an entry or a stairwell that is already being cleaned under the building's contract, and pay twice for a result nobody is coordinating. Equally, an area that looks like common property may sit inside your demise and be nobody's responsibility. Both situations are common and both are settled by one conversation with the manager.

Write down where your responsibility starts and stops, using physical features rather than legal language. The inside face of the tenancy door. The internal side of the shopfront glass. The amenities within the demise but not the shared ones on the landing. Providers can price that. They cannot price a description that refers to the tenancy without saying which surfaces are on which side of the line.

Give the same boundary to every bidder. Without it, one provider will include the external glass and another will not, and the difference in price will look like a difference in value. It is worth walking the boundary physically with each provider during the site visit, because the ambiguous points become obvious when you are standing at them rather than reading about them and the wording alone rarely resolves them satisfactorily.

There are practical advantages to using whoever already services the building. They hold access, know the waste arrangements and are on site anyway, which often makes a small tenancy easy to add. The disadvantage is that your leverage is limited, since their primary relationship is with the building rather than with you, and a tenancy complaint sits below a common-area one in their priorities and yours may wait behind a lobby that residents can see.

Weigh that against the coordination cost of a separate provider. Two contractors in one building need clear boundaries, separate access arrangements and somebody to resolve the inevitable question of who left the bin bay untidy. Neither approach is automatically right. What is wrong is choosing by default without asking the building's provider to quote or without defining the boundary first or without checking what you already pay for through outgoings.