The floor is the easy part
A showroom is open, hard and largely unobstructed once the vehicles are accounted for. A 24-inch walk-behind autoscrubber is rated around 10,000 square feet an hour on open floor. Even de-rated by a third for cars, stanchions and desks, it is the quickest zone in the building per square foot.
Which is why quoting a dealership on showroom square footage flatters the bid and starves the job. The area that reads as "the showroom" to a dealer is the cheapest thing in the scope.
Glass is where the hours go
Entry glass, the curtain wall, the vehicle display windows and the interior partitions are slow, repetitive, and unforgiving — a streak is visible from across the floor and from the street. Glass should be measured in linear feet and door count, not as part of a floor area, and it should appear in your scope with a stated frequency: interior glass nightly on touch points, full glass at a named interval, exterior on a separate periodic cycle.
If your current proposal says "showroom cleaning" and nothing about glass, you are going to have the same conversation every month.
Two mistakes that cost you a floor
Wrong pad, wrong speed. A high-gloss finish burnished with an aggressive pad or at the wrong speed will haze, and haze does not buff out — it comes back with a scrub-and-recoat, which is capital work on a floor that did not need it.
Neutral cleaner, always. An alkaline general-purpose cleaner used nightly strips finish a little at a time. The floor looks fine for four months and then dulls everywhere at once, and the contractor who caused it is usually gone by then.
What we specify
- Autoscrub or dust mop and damp mop by finish type, with the pad and the chemistry named
- Glass in linear feet, interior and exterior on separate intervals, doors counted
- Vehicle display area worked around stock without moving a single unit
- Entry matting lifted and cleaned underneath, not vacuumed in place
- Burnish and scrub-and-recoat on a stated cycle, amortised into the monthly figure
Ever, and the contract says so. The moment a cleaner drives a unit you have an auto exposure that nobody priced and probably nobody covered. Why that matters more than it sounds.