Why frontages go off faster than anything else
A domestic patio gets dirty from weather. A commercial frontage gets dirty from people, and people are much harder on a surface than rain is.
Drink goes down, sugar goes sticky, dirt sticks to the sugar. Cigarette ends leave tar rings. Gum gets trodden flat and then goes grey and stays for years. On top of that you have the ordinary green film that any shaded paving in Sussex grows over winter. A pub frontage on a north-facing street can look neglected within a season of being laid.
The upshot is that a frontage needs doing more often than the rest of a property and costs less each time. Two or three visits a year on a small area beats one heroic clean every four years, and it is cheaper in total.
What I look at on a survey
The material. Concrete flags, granite setts, brick and old York stone all want different pressure. Setts in particular hold the dirt in the joints rather than on the face, which is where the work is.
The fall. Where does the water run when I rinse? If the answer is straight through your open doors, we do it before opening or I bring a wet vac.
The threshold strip. The metre right at the door takes the most traffic and shows the most improvement. If budget is tight, do that strip and the step and leave the rest.
Anything with a grease source above it. Extractor discharge on a wall above a paved area leaves a fine oily film that traps dirt permanently. Cleaning the paving without dealing with what is dripping on it means doing it again in three months.
The commercial argument
A clean entrance does not win you a customer on its own. A visibly dirty one loses you the ones who were undecided, and it is the sort of thing that turns up in reviews from people who never mention anything positive about the outside at all.
For a leaseholder there is usually a second reason: most commercial leases put the demised external area on the tenant, and a dilapidations schedule at the end of a term is an expensive way to find that out. Keeping it clean throughout is cheaper than restoring it at exit.
How this gets priced
Small areas do not scale down neatly. Getting a machine to site, setting it up and clearing it down again is most of a short job, which is why there is a minimum visit charge on commercial work in the same way as there is on domestic.
Where a frontage is on a repeat cycle, three or four visits a year, that changes. The setup is the same each time but the work is far lighter after the first clean, and the repeat price reflects that. That is a conversation worth having at survey rather than after the first invoice.
Questions
Forecourts and entrances: what buyers ask
Can you do it before we open?
Yes, and for a pub or a restaurant that is nearly always the sensible way round. A forecourt is small enough that a six o'clock start has it washed, rinsed and dry before service. Trying to do the same area at lunchtime means roping off the entrance during the busiest part of your day.
Does chewing gum come off?
Yes, though not with water alone. Gum needs heat or a gum-specific solvent and then a focused nozzle, and it is slow work, roughly a minute a piece on a bad patch. On a pub frontage with two hundred pieces trodden in that is a job in its own right, so I price gum separately rather than burying it in a square metre rate and hoping.
Our frontage is old York stone and the landlord is fussy. Is that a problem?
It is a reason to test first, not a reason to avoid it. Soft old stone, particularly if it is already delaminating, will take surface off under a hard lance. I test in a corner at low pressure with a wide fan, show you the patch, and we agree from there. Sometimes the honest answer is a soft wash and a scrub rather than a jet, and it costs about the same.
What about the smoking area and the bins?
Include them. The smoking shelter and the bin corner are where the tar staining and the sour smell live, and cleaning a spotless frontage while the shelter next to it stays black is a strange result. A hypochlorite wash on the shelter surround usually does more for the place than anything else on the visit.
Arrange a survey
Tell me about the forecourts and entrances
Rough area, surface type and the quietest window on your site is enough to start with. I will walk it before quoting, and put a fixed price in writing afterwards.
Sent
That is with me.
I read every one myself. If you sent photos I can usually come back with a fixed price the same day, or the next morning if it arrives late.