How to send a cleaning quote without a walkthrough

Most cleaning enquiries arrive when a walkthrough is impossible: the customer is
moving, works during your hours, or simply will not wait three days for a visit. A
remote quote is not a guess if you collect the right answers and write down what you
assumed. The process below turns a phone call and a handful of photos into a price you
can hold.

For the structure of the document itself, see
how to write a cleaning quote.
For the arithmetic, start with
house cleaning prices per hour.

The intake that predicts minutes

Minutes are driven by fixtures, not by the customer's adjectives. "It's not too bad"
means nothing; four bathrooms means something. Collect these eight answers every
time:

1. Bedrooms and bathrooms, counted.
2. Approximate square footage.
3. Occupied or empty, and by when.
4. Pets indoors, and how many.
5. Smoking indoors, yes or no.
6. Date of the last professional clean, or "never".
7. What the customer specifically wants fixed: oven, fridge, windows, laundry,
   garage, balcony.
8. Access: parking, keys, lockbox, gate code, elevator restrictions.

Two of those carry more weight than the rest. Bathrooms drive minutes harder than
any other room, because each one is fixtures, grout, glass, and detail work. Date of
last professional clean tells you whether you are quoting a maintained home or a
recovery job.

Ask for photos, and mean it

A short, specific request works better than "send me some pictures":

• The kitchen from the doorway.
• Each bathroom, wide.
• The worst area the customer is worried about.
• One 15 to 30 second video walking through the main floor.

Then read them for the things people do not mention: cluttered counters, carpets in
bathrooms, hard-water staining, evidence of renovation dust, pets visible in the
frame. Photos are also your record if scope is disputed later.

Build the price from the formula, not a feeling

Use your minutes formula on the answers:

routine minutes = 30 + (25 x bathrooms) + (12 x bedrooms) + (square feet / 20)
first visit minutes = routine minutes x 1.75 when the home is heavy or unknown
remote price = (loaded cost per hour x minutes / 60) / (1 - overhead share - profit share)

The formula and the 1.75 factor are MaidPilot planning estimates — ours, not an
industry average. They exist so a phone quote is repeatable, and they should be
replaced by your measured minutes as soon as you have them.

Quote a range when the answers are thin

The most common remote-quoting failure is discovering the scope problem at the door.
The fix is a two-band structure:

A range is not a weakness. It is the honest answer to incomplete information, and it
protects your margin. What customers object to is a fixed price that grows when you
arrive, not a range with a stated way to resolve it.

Confirm at the door in two minutes

Put this in the quote and do it every time:

1. Walk the scope list — the rooms and the extras you priced.
2. Check the two biggest cost assumptions: bathrooms and condition.
3. Confirm the price before supplies come in.
4. If it is different, re-quote on the spot and let the customer choose.

That sequence turns an awkward conversation into a professional one. It also keeps
your first-visit estimates honest, because you learn which intake answers were
inaccurate.

When the photos contradict the answers

Customers do not lie on purpose. They describe the house they clean on a good week, or
the house they think you expect. When the photos show something different — carpet in a
bathroom, a kitchen with no clear counters, a bathroom wall with visible mould — do not
absorb the difference and hope. Send one short reply that names what you saw and prices
it:

Thanks for the photos. The second bathroom shows hard-water build-up on the glass and
grout that will need extra time, so the price is 45 minutes higher than the standard
two-bathroom figure. Everything else matches what you described.

That message costs you nothing and does two useful things: it teaches the customer what
"condition" means in your pricing, and it puts the assumption in writing before anyone
arrives. If they push back on the extra time, you have found out now rather than at the
door with supplies already indoors.

Tighten the funnel with the answers you already have

Remote quoting gives you something a walkthrough never does: a record of how accurate
your guess was. Track it.

quote accuracy = actual minutes on site / quoted minutes

Run that ratio for your last twenty remote quotes. If the average is meaningfully
above one, your intake is missing a condition signal — usually clutter or pets. If it
is below one, you are over-quoting and losing jobs you could have won. Both directions
are fixable, and neither is fixable without the numbers.

Two more funnel rules worth writing down:

• Answer fast. A remote quote can be sent in minutes; a competitor who needs a
  walkthrough takes days. Speed is the whole advantage.
• Follow up once, in writing. A quote that went out on Tuesday and got no reply
  deserves a single, polite follow-up. Not five.

Keep the intake with the job

The reason remote quoting gets easier every month is that the answers, the photos, the
quote, and the actual on-site time end up on one record. MaidPilot stores the enquiry,
the property notes, the quote, and the finished job against the same customer, so the
second quote for that address starts from what really happened.

Want the intake to stop living in your phone? Use the free
cleaning quote template to structure the document,
run a range through the price calculator, or
see the plans for the CRM side.