Apportioning shared entry cleaning across many small Haymarket tenancies

The instinct in a building of small occupiers is for each to take a share of the work, perhaps a week each or a floor each. It rarely holds. Standards drift, a tenancy changes hands, and within a few months the entrance reflects whoever cared most rather than any agreement. A single arrangement with one contractor and one specification is more reliable and usually cheaper per occupier than several fragments.

That means someone has to hold it. In a strata building it is the owners corporation through its manager; in a leased building it is the landlord or their agent. Where neither is active, the tenants can appoint one of their number in writing to instruct the contractor. Whoever holds it, the arrangement should be documented, because a shared service without a named holder eventually becomes nobody's.

The shared list is short but heavily used: street entry and its glazing, foyer floor, mail area, stairs and handrails, lift car and call panels, corridors on each level, shared washrooms if any, and the waste room. Give each a task line and a frequency. Because these areas serve every tenancy, their frequency should reflect the building's total traffic rather than the modest floor area they occupy.

Entry matting deserves a specific mention in a city building, where most soil arrives on footwear from the street. Adequate matting inside and outside the door reduces what reaches the foyer floor and the lift car, and it changes the frequency required to keep them presentable. Record the existing matting in the scope so a bidder can price against reality rather than an assumed arrangement.

The method should come from the leases or the strata schedule wherever one exists, and that generally means unit entitlement or lettable area. Where nothing binding applies, an area-based split is the easiest to defend, with a variation for tenancies that generate obviously disproportionate traffic through the shared entry. Whatever the basis, write it down once and apply it consistently rather than revisiting it every time an invoice arrives.

It also helps to circulate the scope itself, not just the figure. Occupiers who can see the area list, the tasks and the frequencies argue far less about their share than those who receive only a number. If a tenancy wants more than the agreed standard in the shared area, that becomes an additional service they fund separately, which keeps the base arrangement stable. That separation keeps the shared standard predictable for every occupier regardless of what any individual tenancy chooses to add.