A commercial cleaning company is one of the few vendors a property manager hears about every single week. When the work is good, nobody says anything. When it slips, the complaints come from tenants, residents, and ownership at the same time. Choosing the right company up front is cheaper than replacing the wrong one a year later.
This checklist is built for property managers in Florida who are comparing cleaning quotes, replacing an incumbent, or taking on a new building. It covers the eight things to verify before you sign, the question to ask a vendor on each one, and a simple scorecard for comparing bids on the same terms. It applies to any vendor, including Clean Space.
The short version: verify insurance and access, confirm experience with your property type, get a written scope, understand who staffs and supervises the crew, require attendance records and quality inspections, agree on how problems get fixed, compare pricing against the same scope, and test how the vendor handles multiple buildings and onboarding.
1. Verify Insurance, Safety, and Building Access
Start with the paperwork, because it rules vendors out fastest. Ask for a current certificate of insurance that names your management company and ownership entity, plus proof of workers’ compensation coverage. Ask how employees are screened before they get keys or badges to your building, and how the vendor handles after-hours access, alarm codes, and lost keys.
Question to ask: “Can you send a certificate of insurance naming us as additional insured, and walk me through how your staff are screened and given building access?”
2. Check Experience With Your Property Type
An apartment community, a medical office, and a multi-tenant office building are three different cleaning jobs. Apartment common areas take resident traffic seven days a week and need turnover cleaning between leases. Medical offices have disinfection requirements. Office buildings need day porter coverage during business hours and heavier cleaning at night. A vendor that is excellent at one may be learning on the job at another.
Ask for two or three comparable accounts and permission to call them. A verified review is a reasonable stand-in when references are hard to get. One of Clean Space’s property management clients, Alex Fernandez, put it this way in a Google review: “We have worked with clean space for over 3 years now. Their staff has been super helpful with cleaning our 5 buildings and treating our residents well.”
Question to ask: “Which accounts do you clean today that look like this building, and can I speak with one of them?”
3. Demand a Written Scope of Work
Most disputes between property managers and cleaning companies come down to a scope that was never written down. “Regular cleaning” means something different to every person in the building. A usable scope lists each area, the tasks in that area, how often each task happens, what is excluded, who supplies consumables like paper and soap, and which periodic services (floor care, carpet extraction, pressure cleaning, window cleaning) are included or quoted separately.
The scope should come from a walkthrough, not a template. If a vendor quotes your building without seeing it, treat the number as a placeholder.
Question to ask: “Can you send me the written scope you would attach to our agreement, with frequencies by area and a list of exclusions?”
4. Understand Staffing, Training, and Supervision
The crew is the service. Find out whether the people cleaning your building are employees or subcontractors, who trains them on your building’s requirements, who supervises them on site, and what happens when someone calls out. Ask who is responsible when the same problem shows up twice. If the answer is a customer service line rather than a named person, expect to spend your own time managing the account.
Clean Space assigns trained teams to each building with an account manager responsible for staffing, service quality, and follow-through. Whatever vendor you choose, get the equivalent commitment in writing.
Question to ask: “Who trains the crew on our building, who supervises them, and who do I call when something goes wrong?”
5. Require Attendance Records and Quality Inspections
This is where most vendor comparisons fall apart, because the answer is usually “trust us.” Two separate things need to be verifiable: that the crew showed up for the scheduled time, and that the work met the standard. Attendance and quality are not the same thing. A crew can clock in on time and still miss the third-floor restroom.
For attendance, ask whether clock-ins are GPS-verified against a geofence around your building, and whether you can see the record. For quality, ask how inspections are done, how they are scored, whether photos are required, and how failed items are tracked. Clean Space runs both through Clean Corner, its own operations platform: GPS-verified time punches classified as inside or outside the job-site geofence, inspection templates built by facility area with Pass/Fail or numeric scoring, required photos, and failed items tracked until they are corrected. The full process is on the commercial cleaning quality control page.
Question to ask: “Show me what I would receive after a visit that proves the crew was on site, and what an inspection report looks like when something fails.”
6. Establish Complaint and Corrective-Action Procedures
Every vendor will miss something eventually. The difference between a good one and a bad one is what happens next. Before you sign, agree on who receives a complaint, how it is logged, who reviews it, what corrective action can involve (re-cleaning, retraining, a staffing change), and how you find out it was resolved. A problem that lives in a text thread with a supervisor is a problem that will come back.
Question to ask: “If a tenant reports a missed restroom on Tuesday morning, walk me through exactly what happens and when I hear back.”
7. Compare Pricing, Contracts, and Reporting
Compare bids against the same written scope, or you are comparing nothing. A lower number with fewer visits, no consumables, or no periodic services is not a lower price. Then read the agreement: the term and cancellation notice, how additional work is priced, when and how rates can change, how invoices are structured, and what reporting you get access to. Clean Space works without long-term contracts and backs its work with a satisfaction guarantee; not every vendor does, and the difference matters when you need to make a change.
Question to ask: “What is the cancellation notice, how are extras priced, and what reports or portal access do I get as part of the agreement?”
8. Test Multi-Location Coverage and Onboarding
If you manage more than one property, the questions change. Does the vendor cover every market you are in, or only the one you are standing in today? Will each building get its own written scope, or one plan copied across the portfolio? Who owns the account, and can invoicing be consolidated? What does the first 30 days look like: key handoff, crew introductions, the first inspection, and how issues from the previous vendor get cleaned up?
Clean Space serves 18 Florida service areas and runs portfolios under one multi-location commercial cleaning program with site-specific scopes and one account manager for the whole portfolio. Ask any vendor you are considering for the same level of detail.
Question to ask: “Which of our cities do you cover with your own crews, and what happens in the first 30 days after we sign?”
Commercial Cleaning Vendor Scorecard
Use the same eight points to score every bid out of 100. The weights below are an editorial starting point, not an industry standard. They put the most weight on the four things that cause the most problems after signing: the written scope, staffing and supervision, verifiable attendance and inspections, and insurance. Adjust them for your own portfolio.
| Criterion | Weight | What a 5/5 looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance, safety, and access | 15 | Current COI naming you, workers’ comp, documented screening and key control |
| Relevant property experience | 10 | Two or more comparable accounts you can call |
| Written scope of work | 15 | Area-by-area tasks, frequencies, exclusions, consumables, periodic services |
| Staffing, training, and supervision | 15 | Named account manager, on-site supervision, call-out coverage |
| Attendance records and inspections | 15 | GPS-verified clock-ins you can see, scored inspections with photos |
| Complaint and corrective action | 10 | Logged issues, named reviewer, documented resolution |
| Pricing, contract, and reporting | 10 | Like-for-like bid, clear cancellation terms, portal or report access |
| Multi-location delivery and onboarding | 10 | Own crews in each market, site-specific scopes, 30-day onboarding plan |
Score each criterion from 1 to 5, multiply by the weight, and divide by 5. A vendor that scores under 60 is usually asking you to do their quality control for them. A vendor above 85 has answered every question with something you can verify.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a Florida property manager look for in a commercial cleaning company?
Proof on eight points: insurance and building access, experience with your property type, a written scope, named staffing and supervision, verifiable attendance and inspections, a corrective-action process, clear pricing and contract terms, and the ability to cover every property you manage. The vendor should be able to show evidence for each, not just describe it.
How can a property manager verify that a cleaning company completed its work?
Ask for two records: a GPS-verified clock-in showing the crew was on site during the scheduled window, and a scored inspection with photos showing the work met the standard. Attendance alone does not prove quality. Clean Space provides both through Clean Corner, with client access through a member portal and app.
What should be included in a commercial cleaning contract for an apartment community?
A written scope for common areas (lobbies, hallways, amenity spaces, fitness rooms, trash rooms) with frequencies, turnover cleaning terms and pricing for vacant units, consumables responsibility, periodic services such as pressure cleaning and floor care, the cancellation notice, and how complaints are handled.
Should I sign a long-term contract with a commercial cleaning company?
Only if the pricing or service level justifies it. A vendor confident in its work does not need a long term to keep you. Clean Space works without long-term contracts; if a vendor requires one, make sure the cancellation terms protect you when service slips.
How do I compare cleaning quotes fairly?
Send every vendor the same written scope and ask them to price it as written, with extras listed separately. Then score each bid on the scorecard above so price is one factor out of eight, not the only one.
Put Clean Space Through the Checklist
Clean Space has cleaned commercial properties across Florida since 2011 and is happy to answer all eight questions in writing. Send your building details for a free walkthrough and a written scope through our janitorial services team, or request a free quote and call 1-754-254-0375.
