What should be included in a strata cleaning scope in Alexandria?

Whole blocks between Bourke Road, Huntley Street and the Erskineville border have been converted from printworks, wool stores and light-industrial sheds into apartments. Those buildings have common areas that a purpose-built block does not: double-height lobbies with exposed steel and services overhead, original brickwork that sheds dust for years, and polished concrete that stains from a single alkaline mistake.

A scope copied from a modern tower will fund the wrong things. It will pay for corridor vacuuming at a frequency nobody needs and leave four metres of visible grey dust above the lobby entirely unaddressed.

Write it as areas and frequencies, not as a general promise to keep the building clean.

The first is the bin room. Conversions were rarely fitted with a bin room sized for the lot count they ended up with, so overflow lands on the floor between collections. Cleaning it more often does not fix an undersized room — but a contractor who photographs the overflow gives the committee the evidence it needs to justify an additional bin, which does.

The second is height. Anything above three metres is invisible in a walkthrough and extremely visible in a photograph taken from the lobby floor, which is usually what happens in the week before an AGM. Fund it quarterly and it never becomes an agenda item.

Ask for a monthly photo audit against the written scope, a signed visit record, and a defect log with a stated close-out time. Send it to the strata manager and copy a nominated committee contact, so nobody is relaying information at a general meeting from memory.

Where the building has commercial ground-floor tenancies, quoting those alongside the common areas usually reduces the total because travel and supervision are absorbed once — but the lot and common-property lines must stay separated on the invoice.