Building cleaning vs hiring your own crew.
The lease says cleaning is included. It is, in the way a hotel breakfast is included. Here is what the building crew covers, what it skips, and when to bring in your own.
Every New York office lease has a cleaning clause, and every office manager reads it the same way: cleaning is included, so we are fine. Six months later they are wiping down the conference table themselves before a client meeting, and the building's answer to the complaint is a form.
Here is what building cleaning actually is, what it is not, and when a tenant should hire their own crew.
What the building crew does
Building janitorial is the landlord's program. It is scoped to the landlord's property: the lobby, the elevators, the corridors, the shared restrooms on the floor, the loading dock. In most leases it also includes a nightly trash pull from your suite and, in some Class A buildings, a light vacuum of your open areas.
That is where it stops. The crew is large, rotates across the building, and works to the building's checklist. They are not looking at your kitchen, your conference room glass, or the desk the founder does not want touched, because none of that is in their scope. It is not their fault. It was never their job.
What it skips
- Desks, shared surfaces, and anything on them
- Your kitchen, including the fridge, the machine, and the dishwasher
- Your conference rooms and phone booths, glass included
- Your private restrooms, if you have them
- High-touch disinfection inside the suite
- Floors beyond a pass down the middle, if that
- Anything that requires learning your office
When to bring in your own crew
The moment the inside of your suite matters to your business. Clients visit. Candidates interview. Your team eats lunch at their desks. You have a kitchen people actually use. Any one of those means the building crew's scope is not your scope.
The good news is that hiring your own crew does not mean giving up the building service. You keep the common areas and the trash pull that come with rent. You add a company that cleans the inside of the suite to your standard, on your schedule. The two do not conflict, and the building will usually ask only for a Certificate of Insurance and a vendor form.
What a tenant crew looks like
A dedicated crew that knows your office. Nightly or a few nights a week, a checklist built for your space, the same faces, and one number to call when something is not right. Priced by the hour, so a 5,000 square foot suite runs about $1,900 to $2,500 a month for five nights, less for three. It is a real cost. It is also the cost of never wiping the conference table yourself again.
Breezy works alongside building crews in most of the big Midtown and downtown towers, and the arrangement is routine: the building does the corridor, we do everything past your door. The nightly cleaning page covers what that includes.
