Choosing and managing vendors for a building

Which services should a building tender, and how often?

A typical apartment block buys a dozen services on contract: cleaning, lift maintenance, building insurance, gardening, fire equipment servicing, pest control, pool maintenance where there is one, security or concierge in larger buildings, and the managing agent itself. Between them these are most of the operating budget, and most of them renew automatically unless someone acts.

Tender the big ones — cleaning, lift, insurance — every two to three years, or at the natural break the contract allows, and re-quote the smaller ones when the price moves or the service slips. Many buildings' regulations require the committee to obtain more than one quote above a stated amount, and major contracts or works often need a general meeting decision; check what yours say before signing anything. Tendering is not disloyalty to a good contractor: the incumbent is usually invited, often wins, and the exercise is what lets the committee tell owners at the AGM that the price was tested.

How do you write a scope that gets comparable quotes?

Quotes are only comparable if they answer the same question. Three cleaning companies asked to "quote for cleaning the building" will quote three different jobs. Write the scope down first and send the same page to everyone:

• Frequency and days — three visits a week, which days, which hours.
• Areas and tasks — stairwells, lobby, lift car, bins area, glass, external paths; what is done each visit, what weekly, what monthly.
• Materials and equipment — included or charged.
• Response time for a call-out and the price of one.
• Term, start date, notice period, and whether the price is indexed.
• Price per month, stated excluding and including VAT.

For a lift, the scope is the maintenance standard the contract follows, the number of visits per year, what is included in the fixed price — call-outs, small parts, the annual safety check attendance — and what is charged extra. For insurance, it is the sum insured, the cover sections, the excesses and the declared claims history. One page, the same to everyone, with a date by which quotes are due.

How do you compare quotes fairly?

Put every quote on the same basis before reading the totals: the same scope, the same period — annualise monthly and quarterly prices — the same VAT treatment, and the same allowance for the things one quote includes and another charges extra. A lift quote at €95.00 a month with call-outs and parts extra can cost more over a year than one at €140.00 all-in; a cleaning quote that excludes materials is not cheaper if the materials come to €40.00 a month.

Then look past the price. Ask for two references from buildings like yours, and call them. Ask for the insurance certificates described below. For regulated work — lifts, fire systems, gas, electrical — ask for the certification or registration the work requires in your country and confirm it with the competent authority or the trade body; a lift maintenance company is not the same as the independent inspection body that carries out the periodic safety inspection, and you need both. Record the comparison on one page and keep it with the contract, so the decision can be shown at the AGM and to the owner who asks why the cheapest quote lost.

What must be in the contract register?

A contract you cannot find is a contract that renews on the vendor's terms. Every service contract and insurance policy should sit in one register with the fields that matter, and the register should remind you before the dates arrive — not on them. Domera's contracts and insurance lifecycle holds this register per building, reads the key dates from the uploaded document for you to confirm, and links the lift contract to the lift's compliance item so renewals and inspections stay in step.

The date that matters most is not the end date but the last day to give notice. A three-year contract ending on 31 December with a three-month notice period must be cancelled by 30 September, or it renews. Diary the notice date with a lead time long enough to run a tender — three months before the notice date is a reasonable default for a major contract.

Why ask contractors for their insurance certificates?

When a cleaner slips on the stairs, a lift engineer damages the car, or a roofer drops a tile on a parked vehicle, the first question is whose insurance responds. If the contractor has none, the answer tends to be the building's — or nobody's. Before a contractor starts, ask for a current certificate of public liability insurance, and where they employ people, employers' liability where your country requires it; for design or advisory work, professional indemnity. Read the expiry date and the limit, file the certificate with the contract, and ask for the renewed one when it lapses.

The building's own insurer may require this — some policies make cover conditional on contractors being insured — and the building's own policy should be in the same register with its renewal date, sum insured and the last valuation. What insurance a contractor is legally obliged to carry varies by country; the practical rule does not: no certificate, no keys.

How do you track spend per vendor and category?

Every invoice should land against a vendor and an expense category, so that at any point you can answer two questions: what did we pay this vendor in the last twelve months, and what did this category cost against its budget line? Contract invoices that arrive every month for the same amount are best set up as recurring expenses from the contract — Domera's recurring expense automation generates them on schedule — so the routine cost is booked without retyping and anything that arrives outside the pattern is visibly an exception.

Report both views at the AGM: spend by category against budget, and the top vendors by spend with their contract end dates. Owners who can see that the lift contract costs €1,680.00 a year, was tendered in 2025 and ends in 2027 ask fewer questions than owners who see "maintenance: €14,200.00".

When is an invoice out of pattern?

Once contracts and history are in the register, the odd invoice shows itself. Look for: an amount well above the vendor's norm without a quote or a call-out record behind it; the same amount and reference as an invoice already booked; an invoice from a contract vendor in a month the contract does not cover; a change in frequency — the quarterly service now billed monthly; and, above all, a request to pay to new bank details. That last one is the most common fraud a building meets, and the rule is to confirm any change of account by telephone to a number you already hold, never to one on the invoice or the email.

Domera's dashboard surfaces the statistical cases — invoices well above the vendor's norm, possible duplicates — as a feed for a person to work through; it does not judge them. Our post on what AI does and should never do explains the limits. The human step is a two-minute check: does the contract say this, did anyone order it, has it been paid before? The compliance record closes the loop for regulated services, because an inspection certificate that never arrives is also an invoice pattern worth questioning.