Two Portland cleaning companies come up in your search. One shows 5.0 stars from eleven reviews. The other shows 4.6 from sixty five. Most people click the 5.0, and most of the time that is the wrong read.
We are a cleaning company writing about how to read cleaning company reviews, so weigh this accordingly. Our own rating is 4.6 out of 5 across 65 Google reviews. Not a perfect 5. We would rather explain how to read that number than pretend it says something it does not.
Review count matters more than the average
Do the arithmetic once and you stop trusting small samples. A company with ten five star reviews and one one star review averages 4.64. The same single bad visit at a company with 65 reviews moves the average to about 4.94. The 5.0 business is not better. It has fewer visits behind it, so one ordinary bad day would have wrecked the number, and one has not happened yet.
Our rule of thumb: below roughly thirty reviews, treat the average as noise and read the text instead. Above that, the average starts to describe the company rather than its luck.
The three star reviews are the ones worth reading
Five star reviews tend to say the house looks amazing and the team was lovely. Pleasant, and close to useless. One star reviews are usually written mid-argument, often about a bill, and it is hard to tell from the outside who was right.
Three star reviews come from people who got a real service, thought it was mostly fine, and had one specific complaint they still bothered to write down. That is where you learn the actual tradeoff: the bathroom was perfect but they never touched the baseboards, the crew was great but arrived ninety minutes late, the clean was good but the quote and the invoice did not match. Sort by lowest rating, then read up from the bottom into the middle.
Patterns tell you the truth, single incidents do not
One complaint about a missed windowsill is a bad Tuesday. Five complaints about the same thing spread across two years is how the company works.
Put every complaint into one of two buckets.
- Quality: work was rushed, areas were skipped, the finish was not what they expected.
- Communication: nobody called back, the crew showed up hours off, the invoice held a surprise, a cancellation was handled badly.
Quality complaints are usually about one crew on one day, and a company can fix them. Communication complaints are structural. Scheduling, quoting and billing all come out of an office, and the office does not change between visits. A company with scattered quality complaints and a clean communication record is worth a call. A company with repeated communication complaints will handle you the same way it handled them.
Recency matters because the people change
House cleaning is staffed by people, and people leave. A glowing review from 2019 describes a crew that may not work there now. Weight the last twelve months heaviest, the last three years lightly, and everything older as background.
Watch the shape of the timeline too. A run of complaints that starts and then stops often means something changed in management. A run of praise that stops means the same thing in the other direction.
Here is our version of that problem, since it shows up in reviews of every company that employs cleaners. We send the same crew back to the same home wherever possible. Illness, time off and staff changes cause substitutions anyway, and we do not notify clients in advance of a crew change. A substitute is given full current notes on the home. If you read a review that says the second visit felt different from the first, that is usually what happened, and no cleaning company staffed by humans is immune to it.
What reviews cannot tell you
This is the part that costs people money. Reviews describe how a visit felt. They almost never describe what was actually bought.
Scope
A three star review from someone who expected the inside of the oven and a five star review from someone who expected wiped surfaces can describe the exact same two hours of work. Neither reviewer tells you which one they booked.
Minimum charges
Reviewers rarely mention them, and a minimum can make a small apartment cost more per square foot than a house. Ours is a $133 minimum service charge with a two hour minimum visit, and how that plays out by home size is published rather than quoted on request.
Exclusions
Most disappointment starts here, and it reaches reviews only after someone is already annoyed. Ours include: we do not shampoo carpets, clean inside fireplaces, handle pet messes or body fluids, empty litter boxes, clean rooms heavily affected by mold, clean outdoor areas, wash dishes, move furniture over 20 lb, clean above 8 feet, clean chandeliers, or strip beds. Ask any company you are considering for its version of that list before you book, not after.
Hours and cancellation terms
Our cleaning visits run Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Cancelling inside 48 hours is charged at half the service. A happy reviewer had no reason to mention either one, and you will care about both. All of our terms sit on the FAQ page so you can read them before you commit rather than discover them on an invoice.
Read what happens after a company gets it wrong
Every cleaning company has bad visits. The recovery predicts your experience better than the failure does, so hunt for reviews that describe what happened after the complaint was made. Did anyone answer? Was there an argument about money? Did they come back?
Ours, stated plainly so you can hold us to it: we do not give discounts. We return and touch up the areas you are unhappy with, and your feedback has to reach us within 24 hours. Some people want money off instead. We are not the company for that, and it is better that you know now than after you have booked.
When a review section is not what it looks like
None of these prove anything alone. Two or three together should slow you down.
- A cluster of five star reviews posted within a few days of each other after months of silence.
- Wording that reads like the company website, listing service names and the city instead of describing a house.
- No detail at all. Real customers name a room, a problem, or a person.
- Testimonials that appear only on the company’s own site, with no first name attached and no way to click through to the account that wrote them.
How we would want you to read ours
4.6 out of 5 across 65 Google reviews. Enough reviews that one rough visit does not move the number much, which is exactly why it is not a 5.0. We have been cleaning Portland homes since 2005, and over that long a run some visits go wrong.
So read the low ones. Check whether the complaints cluster around the cleaning or around the office. Then compare the terms above against whatever the other company on your list will put in writing. If you want a wider checklist, we wrote one on how to compare house cleaning companies in Portland.
Ready to book house cleaning in the Portland Metro Area? Call 1 888 404 7930 or email info@greenearthhousecleaning.com. Quotes are free with no obligation.
