Hi Folks: Pricing out a commercial in/out cleaning. I do not have pictures. There are 96 panes of glass on the 2nd story (3 rows of glass, 4 panes per row. Panes are about 3’ x 2’. Then there are 72 panes on the first floor. So we are talking 168 panes of glass in/out. Do I price them like I would residential or should it be more? I would be using a WFP. And, there are hard water spots/leeching spots from the building on the glass. Should I add another 40% to the cost if I have to apply a slurry by hand or should it be double.
Generally commercial is less than residential. I usually cut in half my res charge. I don’t go after much commercial, only the ones that call me. To me commercial is maybe a little easier but not that much. I hate cutting my price to get a job unless it can turn into a recurring clean.
I usually cut my price on commercial about 10-20% over residential only because of the “assembly line” of windows that they typically have. Since it is one pane after the other and I do not have to walk far to the next pane or move anything it usually works out well that way. I would say that having to do hard water removal on commercial is usually more of a pain then on residential, so for that I would charge either the same or more. Good luck.
our exterior resi price is pretty close to our commercial in/out price. larger comm jobs usually are exterior only, so i usually do a panr count, then re walk the job and get a timing in my had, then meet somewhere in the middle. Resi is a set per pane price, sometimes cut down with the use of water fed.
When it comes to the stain removal- I’ve had good success using bio-clean on my reach around with a scrub pad. I think that using this method could cut down on labor/effort expended, even for the first floor work. For low work, you might want to put the scrub pad holder on a separate short pole to make the WFP easier to work with.
As far as pricing it, I have a completely separate pricing structure from my resi. I have a base price for whatever types of panes I’m dealing with, and then step it up by increments according to height. For instance, we have a set of hospital buildings we do outside only each year that have panes in the 2x3 to 4x3 range. For the floor level, they’re $2 a piece, 2nd floor is $4, 3rd floor is $6. These prices are a little lower than I like, I’d prefer $3, $5, & $8 respectively. That’s the thing about commercial, if you stick to your ideal price, you will acquire fewer accounts. But if you can afford to build your base of commercial customers slowly, it’s worth it for the higher profit (IMHO).
168 x number of minutes to clean each pane = price
example: 168 panes x 3.00 avg per pane = 504 168 X 3 minutes avg per pane = 504 minutes divided by 60 = 8.4 HOURS x RATE PER HOUR example 8.4 X 60.00 per hour = 504
