CarpetBossPro Blog — Commercial & Property Managers

Apartment Carpet Move-Out Cleaning: Turning Units for the Leasing Office

A tenant moves out on the 28th. The new tenant moves in on the 3rd. Somewhere between those two dates, the paint gets touched up, the unit gets cleaned, and the carpet gets cleaned or replaced. The leasing office wants it done quickly, done right and billed in a way their regional manager can understand. That is apartment move-out work in a nutshell.

Move-Outs Are a Different Rhythm

Office work runs on schedules and access instructions, the subject of Keys, Lockboxes and Alarm Instructions: Access Notes on Commercial Carpet Jobs. Apartment move-outs run on requests. You do not know which unit is next until the leasing office tells you.

That makes move-outs less predictable than monthly office maintenance, but steadier than most residential work. A complex of a few hundred units turns over units every month of the year. A carpet cleaner who reliably turns units fast becomes the only call the leasing office makes.

Every Unit Is Its Own Address

In CarpetBossPro, the apartment complex or its management company is one client, and each unit is an address under that client: “Building C, Unit 12,” “Building C, Unit 14,” and so on. Each address keeps its own carpet job details: the rooms, square feet, carpet type and access notes such as “key from the leasing office” or “lockbox on the door.”

Keeping units separate matters. When Unit 12 comes up again in two years, you can see what was cleaned last time, what condition the carpet was in, which stains did not come out and the photos from that visit. A new job at the address fills in from its last job. How to name and organize those addresses is covered in Unit Numbers and Building Letters: Setting Up Apartment Carpet Addresses the Right Way.

Getting the Request Onto the Schedule

Move-out requests come in every way imaginable: a call, a text, an email, a sticky note handed to the tech. The goal is to get every one of them onto the Waiting List, where new requests sit next to everything else that has come due. From there, the office puts the unit on a van and a day.

The leasing office can request service through the customer app, and the office can add requests that come in by phone or text. Requests from the leasing office get their own guide next.

When several units at the same complex need work in the same week, the Waiting List map shows them together, and the office can stack them on one day. Turning five units in one visit is far better than five trips to the same property.

Pricing Move-Out Cleanings

Most companies keep move-out pricing simple for leasing offices: a set price by unit size, such as one-bedroom, two-bedroom or three-bedroom, with add-ons for the extras that come up. Set up a move-out cleaning service in your service list, and add the common extras:

• Spot removal for the stains tenants leave behind.
• Pet odor treatment when the unit had a pet, priced per room.
• Deodorizer for units that need a fresher start.
• Stairs or hallway for townhome-style units.

Services can also be priced from the address's measurements, by square foot or by number of rooms, if the complex prefers that. Whatever you agree with the leasing office, put it in your service list so every unit is priced the same way.

The Tech's Visit

Move-out units are usually empty, which makes the tech's job faster but makes documentation even more important. Nobody from the leasing office is watching. The tech logs in, opens the job, taps Start, takes before photos, works the carpet cleaning checklist and records the rooms cleaned, the estimated dry time, any stains that did not come out and a condition: Good, Needs attention or Repair recommended.

That condition rating is useful to a leasing office. “Repair recommended” with a photo of a torn seam in the bedroom tells them the unit might need more than cleaning before move-in, while there is still time to deal with it.

Billing the Leasing Office

Most leasing offices and management companies want one bill. Set the client to Monthly billing and CarpetBossPro sends one statement each month covering every unit cleaned, with each line labeled by address. The leasing office can match each line to a unit in their own records without calling you. If a complex prefers to pay per job, card on file charged on completion works too.

Becoming the Leasing Office's Only Call

Leasing offices keep the carpet cleaner who is easy to work with. Fast turnarounds, clear photos, honest condition notes and one clean statement a month are what make you easy. For the rest of the commercial and property manager tools, visit the CarpetBossPro commercial carpet cleaning software page.