What commercial facility management actually costs

What does commercial facility management cost?

Commercial facility services are priced per square foot per month for recurring scopes and per hour or per job for reactive work, and the recurring number moves far more on scope and frequency than it does on building size.

Anyone who quotes you a rate before walking the building is quoting a template. Two 50,000 square foot buildings can differ by a factor of two on janitorial alone, depending on restroom count, floor type, occupancy density and how many nights a week the scope runs.

The number you should ask any vendor for is not the rate. It is the assumptions behind the rate: how many labour hours per visit, how many visits per week, and what is explicitly excluded.

What actually drives the price?

Labour hours drive almost everything, and every other variable is really a question about how many hours the building needs.

• Frequency

  Five nights a week versus three is not a 40% difference in cost, because setup and travel are fixed per visit. It is usually less. Ask for both.

• Restroom count

  Restrooms are the most labour-dense square footage in any building. Two buildings of identical size with different fixture counts do not price the same.

• Floor type

  Carpet, VCT, polished concrete and terrazzo each carry different cycles and different periodic costs. Periodic floor work is often quoted separately and it should be.

• Occupancy density

  A call center at 100 square feet per person generates several times the work of an executive floor at 400.

• Day porter coverage

  Business-hours coverage is a separate line and it is usually the one cut first and missed most.

• Access and security

  Badging, escorts, secured areas and restricted hours all add hours that do not appear in the scope description.

• Consumables

  Vendor-supplied paper and soap raises the monthly and removes a purchasing task. Client-supplied keeps unit cost visible. Neither is wrong, but comparing one against the other is.

Why do two bids for the same building come back so far apart?

Almost always because they are pricing different scopes, and the cheaper one has quietly removed something you assumed was included.

The most common gaps between a low bid and a real one: periodic floor care excluded, day porter excluded, consumables excluded, restroom frequency reduced, or a labour hour count that cannot physically cover the square footage.

There is a check for that last one. Divide the building's cleanable square footage by the labour hours the vendor is quoting per visit. If a single cleaner is being asked to cover more than roughly 3,500 to 4,000 square feet an hour in general office space, the scope is not going to get done and the shortfall will show up as complaints in month two.

Does bundling several trades with one vendor actually save money?

It rarely lowers the hourly rate and it usually lowers total cost, because most of the money lost in facility management is lost in coordination rather than in labour.

A single-trade vendor is often cheaper per hour because they are specialised. What a bundled contract removes is the overhead around the work: one COI to track instead of five, one point of escalation, one invoice to code, and no forty-minute conversation about whose scope a problem falls into.

The honest version is this. If you run one building and have time to manage five vendors well, bundling saves you less than the pitch suggests. If you run six buildings, it is the difference between managing vendors and managing property.

What should a facility services budget include that most miss?

The lines most often missing from a first-draft budget are periodic floor care, exterior pressure washing, parking lot restriping and after-hours reactive calls.

• Periodic floor care

  Strip and wax, burnishing, carpet extraction. Annual or semi-annual, priced separately from recurring janitorial.

• Exterior washing

  Entry concrete, facade, dumpster pads. Quarterly on entries is normal on the Gulf Coast.

• Parking lot restriping

  Every 18 to 36 months. Budget it on a cycle rather than reacting to an inspection.

• Reactive and after-hours

  A reserve for the calls that are not on any schedule. Most buildings under-reserve this and then treat every incident as an exception.

• Turnover and make-ready

  Suite turns, paint and post-construction cleaning between tenants, driven by your leasing activity rather than by the calendar.