End of lease cleaning Sydney: lead cost down 26.51%

A bond clean has a deadline stamped on it

End of lease work comes with a deadline attached. The tenant has a final inspection on a fixed day, a bond sitting with the agent, and roughly a day's patience for finding somebody.

They search once. They compare two or three names. They book. There is no nurture cycle and no second chance, and if you miss the window by a day the job has gone to whoever answered first.

Sydney squeezes this trade from both ends

Bond cleaning, exit cleaning and end-of-tenancy work across the Inner West, the North Shore and the CBD is fought over by national franchises with real marketing budgets and by one-van operators with none. The clicks get priced by that fight rather than by the value of the job.

Meanwhile the work itself is priced against a ceiling everybody already knows. Tenants have a fair idea what a two-bedroom exit clean should cost, and agents talk to each other. So the operator gets it from both sides: a contested click on one, a market-rate job on the other.

One more feature of this category shapes everything. Volume is not the constraint, because Sydney throws off enormous numbers of end of lease cleaning searches every week. Relevance is the constraint. A huge share of that traffic is people comparing, people who booked yesterday, people after something adjacent, and people who are not actually moving — so an account that buys the category buys mostly noise, while an account that buys the tenant with an inspection on Friday buys jobs.

Lumex Cleaning walked into that with a brand-new account and nothing behind it.

What we took on

A single campaign covering end of lease, bond back, deep cleaning and domestic work across Sydney. The periods reported below are selected and left undated, so nothing here says when the account started or how long it has been running.

Across the account it handled 2,181 impressions and 235 clicks, an account-wide click-through rate of 10.77%. Better than one in ten people served an ad clicked it, and in a category this crowded that does not happen by accident. It does not happen at all if the ad is written to the industry rather than to the tenant with an inspection on Friday.

The ads appeared for 23.32% of the searches they were eligible for, and held a top-of-page position 12.96% of the time. Worth saying plainly, because it frames everything below: roughly three-quarters of Sydney's end of lease cleaning demand was never bid on, and the calendar still filled.

How the account was put together is not something we publish. The short version is that it was built around the enquiries that turn into booked jobs, and the ads speak to the outcome the customer actually wants, which is the bond back in full without an argument.

31 enquiries in one period of 2026, then a cheaper start to the next

The first stretch set the benchmark. It produced 31 conversions at $41.84 per lead over 12 days in 2026, from 190 clicks and 1,768 impressions, at a 16.32% conversion rate. By the end of its second week this was already a working account.

Then it got cheaper. Over the first three days of the next period the account produced 10 conversions at $30.75 per lead, at a 22.22% conversion rate — a 26.51% fall in cost per lead against the period before it.

• $41.84 → $30.75 cost per lead — one measured period to the next, 2026, down 26.51%
• 31 leads at a 16.32% conversion rate — over a 12-day period in 2026
• 10 leads at a 22.22% conversion rate — over the next 3 days
• 41 conversions at $39.13 per lead — across the account's wider run

Be careful with the shape of that. The later figure covers three days, and three days is a strong start rather than a trend. We are not going to present it as one. The twelve-day numbers are the sturdier evidence, and the 26.51% improvement is a comparison between two consecutive periods, nothing more.

11 of the 12 days in the first period in 2026 produced at least one enquiry, and the pattern held into the days after it. The strongest of them brought in 7 enquiries from 18 clicks.

What actually moved between the two periods

Look at what stayed the same and the answer gets easier. The first period in 2026 ran at a 10.75% click-through rate and the opening three days of the next at 10.9%, so the ads were being clicked at almost exactly the same rate.

The difference showed up after the click. 190 clicks produced 31 enquiries in the first period, while 45 clicks produced 10 at the start of the next, off 413 impressions. Whatever moved, it moved on the quality of the traffic rather than the volume of it.

Who enquires, and how they do it

The device split is unusual for a trade account and worth reading properly. Of the 31 enquiries in that first period of 2026, 20 came from a mobile, 10 from a desktop and 1 from a tablet.

Compared with an emergency trade, that is a lot of desktop, and it fits the category. A bond clean is often booked at a desk by somebody organising a move, sometimes by the person managing the property rather than the person living in it. It is a considered enquiry, not a panic.

Channel tells the same story louder. Of the 41 conversions recorded account-wide, 40 arrived as a submitted form and 1 as a phone call. People here want the quote in writing, which means your response time on forms decides more than it would in an emergency trade.

What a full move-out calendar is worth

41 enquiries into the diary is a cleaning business with a calendar of move-out jobs. End of lease work gets scheduled around settlement and inspection dates, so enquiries arriving steadily rather than in clumps are worth more than the raw count suggests. Crews can be routed properly instead of racing across Sydney between two jobs forty minutes apart.

Something on 11 of 12 days is the number an operations manager cares about. The roster can be written in advance, and a second crew becomes a staffing decision rather than a gamble. In a trade where the job has to happen on a specific day, being able to say yes to a Thursday is worth real money.

At under forty dollars an enquiry account-wide, the cost of finding the job stopped deciding whether the job was worth doing. That changes what is worth quoting — a smaller unit, a job further out, a mid-week gap — because the acquisition cost no longer eats the margin on the marginal job.

We have no sight of Lumex's quote-to-book rate or average job value and will not guess at revenue. The enquiry volume and its price are what we can prove, and both are above.

Send us your bond cleaning numbers

If you run an end of lease or bond cleaning business in Sydney and your cost per enquiry keeps climbing, send the numbers over.

We will look at them properly and tell you what we think, including if the answer is that you are already doing fine.