About Kiwi Cleaning Services in Northampton

Kiwi Cleaning Services started in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas with one idea: a cleaning company should tell you exactly what it is going to do, do that, and stand behind it. Everything we built came out of that -- the written 42-point checklist, the Kiwi Clean Guarantee, and quoting the home in front of us instead of reading a number off a price list.

Northampton is a new market for us, and we say so plainly rather than arriving with a stack of claims we have not earned here yet. What we bring is the part of the business that does not depend on tenure: a checklist every visit follows, eco-friendly products that are safe around kids and pets, all our own supplies and equipment, and a free re-clean within 24 hours if a job is not right.

We did the homework before we opened here, because Hampshire County asks different questions of a cleaning company than South Texas does. The first is the age of the houses. More than four in ten homes in Northampton were built before 1940, and the median home in the city dates from 1955. That means original wood floors, deep window casings, long runs of trim, stair rails and built-in cabinets -- surfaces that hold dust where a quick visit never looks. The second is heat. In Belchertown 43.6 percent of homes heat with fuel oil and 10.0 percent with wood, and Hadley is higher still on oil, at 45.3 percent. Where a wood stove is in use, the hearth and the room around it are part of the job. Our checklist spends its hours in different places here than the Texas version does.

The other thing we studied is who rents. Amherst is 55.8 percent renter-occupied and Northampton 42.7 percent, so move-in and move-out cleaning is the second thing on our list here rather than an add-on. Five colleges sit in three of the towns we serve: Smith College in Northampton, Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, and Amherst College, Hampshire College and UMass Amherst in Amherst. We clean off campus only, and we never promise what a landlord decides.

Late summer and early fall are the busy season for cleaning here. If you want a date in those weeks, book ahead rather than the week before.

There are cleaning companies that have worked these towns for years, and their history is theirs to tell rather than ours to borrow. We are a cleaning company that studied the houses here and who lives in them, and built a checklist and a schedule around that. That is the whole claim, and we would rather make a small true one than a large borrowed one.

Every page on this site exists in Spanish as well as English, and quote requests and scheduling can be handled in either. If we would not do it in our own house, we do not do it in yours.