Broward condo and HOA cleaning: what the board should get in writing

Put three things in writing before the board votes: a scope sheet that names every common area and gives each line a frequency, a vendor file with a certificate of insurance naming the association and the management company, and, once the contract is large enough, the competitive bids Florida law requires. Then make every bidder price that same sheet.

Who is really buying the cleaning

Our Broward janitorial page sums up the county in one clause: “Broward runs from beachfront condo towers on the barrier island to gated single-family communities out west.” Either way, a board votes, a manager often runs the purchase, and the page says why paper leads: “A board needs the scope on paper to answer owners. That is why the task list and frequencies come first.” For a manager with several associations, it adds: “One vendor across several buildings, each with its own sheet and its own night, invoiced per property.”

When Florida law requires competitive bids

A condominium association must obtain competitive bids when a contract requires payment that “exceeds 5 percent of the total annual budget of the association, including reserves” (section 718.3026, Florida Statutes); for a homeowners’ association, the line is “10 percent of the total annual budget of the association, including reserves” (section 720.3055). Both statutes require service contracts in writing, and neither requires the board to take the lowest bid.

Cleaning isn’t among the exemptions, which include the association’s own employees and its attorneys, accountants, architects, community association managers, engineers and landscape architects, plus emergencies and a business that is the only source of supply in the county. Two details are easy to miss: a condominium association with 10 or fewer units can opt out of section 718.3026 by a two-thirds vote of the unit owners, and a competitively bid HOA contract can renew without new bids if it lets the board cancel on 30 days’ notice.

This is general information, not legal advice; your association’s attorney or manager should confirm the math. The practical point is simpler: bids only compete when every bidder prices the same written scope at the same frequencies. Our post on comparing commercial cleaning bids shows how to line them up, column by column.

What the written contract should say

Under section 718.3025, a condominium maintenance or management services contract is valid and enforceable only if it specifies the services and the costs the association will reimburse, gives “an indication of how often each service, obligation, or responsibility is to be performed,” sets a minimum number of personnel and makes certain financial-interest disclosures; services not stated on its face can’t be enforced. Whether that reaches a cleaning contract is a question for counsel, but it is the right drafting habit either way. Our billing answer on the Broward janitorial page is short on purpose: “Per visit, after the visit, against the written scope. No long-term lock-in — the scope is the contract, and it is short enough to read.” The remaining clauses are in our checklist of what belongs in a commercial cleaning contract.

The scope sheet, zone by zone

A sheet a board can vote on names each zone and puts a frequency beside it. The quoted lines come from our condo common-area and HOA clubhouse pages; where neither names a frequency, the walkthrough sets one. As both pages put it, “lines get added, removed, and given a frequency before you approve a price.”

• Lobby and mailroom. Our line reads “floors, entry glass, front-desk counters, seating and package-area touchpoints.” Put it on every visit.
• Elevator cab interiors. “stainless panels, rails, floors and door tracks — mechanical maintenance stays with your elevator contractor.”
• Corridors and stairwells. On “a floor-rotation schedule set at the walkthrough.” Write the rotation down: which floors, which night.
• Chute and compactor rooms. “Trash-chute doors, chute rooms and compactor-room floors degreased and deodorized.”
• Pool baths and cabanas. “Common restrooms and cabana baths sanitized and restocked on every visit.”
• Amenity deck. “Route timed around resident peak hours, with weekend amenity resets available.” Decide whether the weekend reset is standing or on call.
• Clubhouse great room and kitchen. “Event and rental turnarounds: same-night or early-morning reset before amenity hours reopen,” plus, in the kitchen, “full trash-out after rentals.”
• Fitness room. “machine touchpoints wiped with EPA-registered disinfectant, mirrors, mats and floors.”
• Management office and board room. “cleaned ahead of meeting nights.”

Work that belongs to other trades

Our condo common-area page draws two lines itself: “Pool water chemistry and equipment stay with your licensed pool service, and elevator mechanical maintenance stays with your elevator contractor. Your board should hear that boundary from a vendor, not discover it later.” Florida licenses the people who maintain and repair elevators (chapter 399, Florida Statutes), and the statute’s definition of an elevator service maintenance contract includes “routine examination, lubrication, cleaning, adjustment, replacement of parts.” Because the word “cleaning” turns up in both contracts, write “cab interior” on the cleaning sheet.

Three more jobs need a named owner: compactor and chute mechanisms, fitness-machine repair, and specialist floor work. On floors, the FAQ on our Miami-Dade janitorial page is plain: “We do not strip and wax, screen, or refinish floors — that is a flooring contractor's job, scheduled separately, and our crew works around it.” Carpet extraction is its own trade too. For all-day coverage, our Broward janitorial page answers the day-porter question: “Not as a standing service today. If your building needs one we will say so plainly and scope what we can actually staff, rather than promising coverage we cannot hold.”

Seasons, rentals, storms and repairs

Write the calendar into the scope. If seasonal owners fill the building in winter, set in-season and off-season frequencies. If the clubhouse rents out on weekends, tie the reset to the rental calendar; our HOA clubhouse page puts the timing this way: “We reset the great room and kitchen the same night or before amenity hours open the next morning, and we answer every day, 24 hours, so a Sunday-morning surprise still gets handled.”

Storms need a clause too. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, according to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center. Say who calls off a visit when the building closes, how a missed visit is billed, and that the first clean after a storm is scoped on its own.

Then there is repair season. Our condo common-area page summarizes the state rule: “A condo or co-op building of three habitable stories or more needs a milestone inspection by the end of the year it turns 30, then every 10 years, and the local enforcement agency may move that to 25 years where conditions such as proximity to salt water call for it.” If testing or repairs follow, contractors share the lobby and elevators with residents; add temporary frequency on that route while the work runs.

Certificate holder or additional insured?

For the certificate of insurance, our condo common-area page says we “deliver the COI within 2 business hours, naming the association and listing the management company as certificate holder or additional insured — however your vendor packet requires it — so approval does not stall a board cycle.”

Those roles differ. The standard ACORD 25 certificate says in its own header that it confers no rights on the certificate holder, and that if the holder is an additional insured, “the policy(ies) must have ADDITIONAL INSURED provisions or be endorsed.” A certificate holder gets proof of coverage; an additional insured gets coverage under the policy itself. Your packet should say which each party needs. The vendor file on our condo common-area page lists “Bilingual EN/ES crews,” and our Broward janitorial page says every visit is fulfilled by “insured, background-checked cleaners working a written checklist.”

What we do, and what we won’t claim

We quote a board the way our HOA clubhouse page describes: “By walkthrough. You get a written scope and price the manager can put straight into the board packet, a COI within 2 business hours of asking, and no payment at booking.”

What we won’t claim: that our bid will be the lowest, or that a scope sheet settles a legal question. The boundaries quoted above stand: pool chemistry and elevator mechanics stay with licensed contractors, floor refinishing with a flooring contractor, and we don’t staff a standing day porter. Nor will we predict how a milestone inspection, or any inspection, turns out; a clean lobby is not a structural finding.

FAQ