What decides the price, in plain language

Nobody can price a house properly over the phone, and any company that gives you a firm number in ninety seconds is either guessing high to protect themselves or guessing low to win the booking and fixing it later. We quote after a twenty minute walkthrough, and the number we give holds. This page explains what we are actually looking at during that walkthrough so the figure makes sense when you get it.

Everything comes down to five things: how many bathrooms, how much of the home is genuinely in use, what the surfaces are, whether there is a lanai or pool cage, and how often we come. Square footage matters far less than people expect. A four bathroom house at 2,400 square feet is more work than a two bathroom house at 3,200, because bathrooms are where the time goes and empty guest rooms are not.

The five things that move the number

• Bathroom count, which matters more than square footage
• How many rooms are actually lived in day to day
• Surfaces: unsealed stone and wood need specific products and care
• Lanai, pool cage, screens and slider tracks
• Frequency: weekly costs less per visit than monthly
• Pets, and how many, and whether they shed
• Condition at the start, which is what a first deep clean fixes
• Access: gate codes, elevators and association rules on condos

Why flat per visit beats hourly

Hourly pricing puts you and the cleaner on opposite sides. Every minute spent doing something carefully costs you more, so the incentive is to slow down, and your only defense is watching the clock in your own house. A flat price removes all of it. The number is fixed, the list is fixed, and how long it takes is our problem rather than yours. If a house turns out harder than the walkthrough suggested, that visit is on us and we talk about the next one.

The frequency discount is real and it is not a sales tactic. A house cleaned every week has almost nothing to catch up on, so the visit is genuinely shorter. A house cleaned every eight weeks has two months of Florida humidity sitting on the grout, and that takes real time. That is why the per visit price goes down as the frequency goes up, and why a first deep clean is usually quoted separately before a recurring plan starts.