What to Put in a Carpet Cleaning RFP
Most carpet cleaning tenders ask for a price to clean a building. That question cannot be answered comparably, which is why the responses never line up.
A carpet cleaning tender usually contains a building's total square footage, a request for a price, and a deadline. Then three proposals arrive that cannot be compared to each other, and the lowest wins by default.
That is not a procurement failure so much as a specification failure. Nobody told the bidders what the work was, so each of them guessed — and the one who guessed least won.
Here is what to include instead.
1. Areas, listed separately
Not a building total. Each area on its own line with its own square footage: lobby, corridors by floor, function space, offices, back of house, amenity areas.
This is the single change that makes bids comparable, because it stops each contractor deciding for themselves what "the building" means.
2. A usage rating against each area
Extreme, high, medium or low. You know your building better than any bidder walking it once, and stating the rating tells them where the work actually is.
It also tells you something about the responses. A bidder who accepts your ratings without comment has not looked; a bidder who queries one has.
3. What you want done, by method
Ask for services separately rather than for "cleaning":
- Restorative extraction — annual count per area
- Interim low-moisture cleaning — annual count per area
- Pile lifting on traffic lanes — frequency
- Fibre protector — which areas
- Spot response — scheduled visits, or explicitly excluded because your own staff handle it
If you do not know what the right counts are, say so and ask each bidder to propose them with reasoning. That answer is more informative than any price.
4. The steps you expect included
This is the section most tenders omit and the one that explains price differences.
State that pre-vacuuming, pre-treatment of spots, a neutralising rinse, grooming and forced drying are included as standard. Every one of those is a real cost, every one is where a bid gets made competitive by omission, and every one has a visible consequence — the pre-vacuum is 80 per cent of the soil, the rinse is what stops the floor resoiling in three weeks, the grooming is what stops it drying striped.
A bid that is materially cheaper than the others is usually not a better rate. It is fewer steps.
5. Your constraints, honestly
Access hours, lift availability, parking and loading, which spaces can never be taken out of service, and how long each area may be out.
Bidders price uncertainty. A building that states its constraints gets a real number; a building that leaves them vague gets a padded one, or a cheap one from somebody who has not understood the job and will discover it on the first night.
6. What the carpet is
Fibre type by area — nylon or wool, and if wool, tufted or woven. Whether protector has ever been applied. Where the original specification document is, if the building still has it.
Wool must be cleaned between 4.5 and 8.5 pH with an acidic neutralising rinse, and the wrong chemistry damages it permanently. If you do not know, say you do not know: a competent bidder will test, and one who does not ask has told you something.
7. How you want the response structured
Ask for the annual total, an equal monthly figure, and the per-area breakdown — and ask for any initial restoration cleaning to be quoted separately from the ongoing programme.
That separation matters. Restoration is a one-off recovery of a floor that has been let go; maintenance is what stops it happening again. Rolled together, one neglected floor inflates what looks like the running cost of maintaining the whole building, and the programme looks expensive at renewal when the restoration is not needed again.
8. Credentials worth asking for
Certification and in what category — carpet cleaning is an unlicensed trade, so this is much of the independent evidence available. Licensed, bonded and insured status. And references from buildings genuinely like yours.
What good looks like in a response
The proposals worth taking seriously come back with your areas, your usage ratings either accepted or argued with, a service count against each, the steps confirmed, and an annual figure with a monthly equivalent. Those can be compared line by line.
Anything that comes back as one number is not a proposal. It is a guess with a price on it.
We respond in this form as a matter of course — send us your specification, or read what a programme covers at commercial services.
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