What drives the price of exterior cleaning.

We don’t publish a rate card, and the reason isn’t coyness. Two houses on the same street can take a different number of hours, a different method and a different amount of chemistry, and a number pulled off a page before anyone has looked at the property is a guess dressed up as a price. What follows is the honest version: the six things that actually move the figure, so you can read any quote — ours or anyone else’s — and know what you are looking at.

01How much surface there is

Not the square footage of the house: the square footage of the thing being cleaned. A single-story home with a long driveway, a patio and a pool deck can carry more flatwork than a larger house with a short approach. Roofs are measured on their own plane rather than on the footprint, so a steeper roof is a bigger roof.

02What it is made of

Material decides method, and method decides time. Stamped concrete and exposed aggregate get chemistry, dwell and a low-pressure rinse — no surface cleaner, because a surface cleaner strips the clear coat off one and washes the stones out of the other. A broom-finish slab takes the faster method. For roofs, tile and composition shingle are two different jobs: tile is rinsed at garden-hose volume, shingle is not rinsed at all. Wood is the slowest surface on any property, because it is the easiest to ruin.

03What is on it, and whether any of it needs its own treatment

General soiling comes off in the main clean. Specific stains do not: oil is degreased as a separate step, in a separate tank, before the cleaning mix goes down, and rust from irrigation or fertilizer is treated with a stain-specific product and test-spotted first. Each of those is its own pass. Heavy growth changes the arithmetic too — a roof that needs two chemistry passes gets two chemistry passes, because raising the pressure instead is how roofs get damaged.

04How the surfaces are reached

Storeys, pitch, gates, slopes, whether a hose reaches the far side of the house, whether a ladder can be footed safely. Access is the quiet driver: the same wall takes longer when getting to it takes longer.

05Whether several services share one visit

This is the one that works in your favor. Setup, plant protection, water and the drive are paid once whether we clean one surface or four, so a roof and gutters together, or a house wash with the windows, costs less than the same work on separate days. It is also why the assessment covers the whole property even when you called about one surface — so you can see the bundle and decide, rather than be sold it.

06Where the water goes

A drain survey happens on every job; wash water never goes to a storm drain; sites that need wash-water capture are scoped and equipped before booking. On most homes that is a few minutes of planning. Where the runoff has nowhere obvious to go, it is part of the scope, and it appears in the written plan instead of surfacing on the day.

A quote that reflects the actual work — not a guess from a satellite photo.

What you get instead of a rate card

A free on-site assessment: 30–45 minutes walking the property, a written report within 24 hours with what we found and what we’d do about it, and written pricing in writing per line before you decide anything. The report is yours to keep, whoever you hire, and no same-day decision is asked for. See the format of the report, or read what an honest limitation looks like in what lifts and what’s forever.