The number of cleaning companies began to grow again

Decreased during the pandemic, the withdrawal of Western companies from Russia and the economic crisis, the number of cleaning companies began to grow again. The market is expecting a strengthening trend: commercial facilities are acquiring new tenants, and citizens are getting used to new economic conditions. However, the demand for third-party cleaning may be limited by the desire of the owners of office and shopping centers to create their own cleaning services in order to save money.

The trend of reducing the number of cleaning companies observed over the past year and a half is beginning to change. In June 2023, the number of cleaning companies in Russia grew by 5% year-on-year, to 37.7 thousand, according to Kontur.Focus. At the beginning of 2020, 40 thousand cleaning companies were operating in the country, over the next year and a half their number decreased to 35.8 thousand.

At first, the market contracted under the influence of the pandemic: many companies transferred their employees to a remote work format, the demand for cleaning commercial real estate fell. In addition, Natalya Afanasova, director of the CORE.XP real estate management department, notes that the reduction was affected by increased inspections by the tax service. Basically, small players left the market, says Alla Tigner, commercial director of O1 Standart.

Then, last year, the outflow of foreign companies from the Russian market also led to the release of office space, which also reduced the demand for cleaning, said Dmitry Vakhranev, head of DID-clean. Not all companies managed to compensate for the shortfall in income through private orders: according to Anton Yakovlev, an expert at Kontur.Focus, many citizens began to refuse paid cleaning of apartments at the beginning of the crisis.

Now many companies have begun to actively return employees to their offices, which has become one of the reasons for the growth in demand for the services of cleaning companies and, accordingly, the growth in their number, Mr. Yakovlev believes. Dmitry Vakhranev adds that in 2023 the number of tenders for the provision of cleaning services, including in business centers, increased.

However, now commercial space managers are optimizing costs, so the market is seeing an increase in the number of companies operating in the low price segment, says Georgy Golenev, CEO of flexible office operator Klyuch. In addition, according to Pavel Lyulin, vice-president of the Union of Shopping Centers, the growth in the number of new cleaning companies will be limited by the fact that some owners of commercial facilities will refuse to attract third-party companies in favor of full-time cleaners.

Interest in cleaning apartments by cleaning companies and private customers has renewed. In the first half of 2023, the demand for such specialists grew by 26% year-on-year, according to the Profi service. Avito Services has even more impressive dynamics: on this platform, the demand for services in the Cleaning category in April-June 2023 increased by 51% year-on-year. The supply is also growing: in April-May 2023, the number of ads from cleaning service providers increased by 18% year-on-year, Avito Services notes.

Daria Andrianova