What “porter service” actually covers
A porter crew handles the work your maintenance team shouldn’t be doing at 6 a.m. — common-area haul-out, breezeway sweeps, and trash-room rotations. At Korvion the porter route runs on the same schedule as your valet trash so the property walks clean before your residents step outside. Porter is the right service for apartment communities, condos, townhomes, and senior living — the property types where a tidied breezeway is part of the morning routine.
What drives porter pricing
Three variables sit behind almost every porter proposal we review:
- Unit count. The simplest signal — the bigger the property, the more common-area square footage the porter covers every cycle.
- Frequency. Seven days a week at a 250-unit building is a different crew than three mornings a week at a 90-unit building. Vendors who quote a single monthly rate without naming the cadence are baking a guess into the number.
- Scope. Common-area haul-out, breezeway sweeps, and trash-room rotations each have separate labor math. A proposal that bundles them into one line is hiding where the cost actually lives.
What a tiered proposal looks like
At Korvion we quote porter inside the same unit-count tier your valet service already runs on, so the schedule is one conversation, not two. In our pricing structure, the porter line moves with the tier:
- Essential (under 100 units).Porter isn’t part of this tier — the schedule here covers bundled trash and recycling only, on a 2×–5× weekly cadence. Properties that need a porter ride move up to Standard.
- Standard (100–250 units). Porter service runs common-area haul-out on the same schedule as your valet route, with same-day bulk and move-out dispatch on the invoice.
- Premium (250+ units). A porter crew on property, schedule-locked. Recycling stream paired with every route (your existing on-site stream adopted as-is), donation routing on bulk, and twice-yearly dumpster audits.
What should already be in the porter line
Anything that isn’t named on the proposal is usually a surcharge waiting to happen. The items we include by default at Korvion — and the items we expect to see on any credible competitor proposal:
- Single-stream recycling paired with every porter route — not as an add-on, not as a price tier.
- Missed-pickup coverage: if the porter route is missed, the crew is flagged inside 15 minutes, an alternate truck dispatches the same day, and a confirmed miss is credited on the next invoice.
- NDA on request — standard carrier items.
Six questions to ask before you sign
The fastest way to read a porter proposal is to send it back to the vendor with these six questions answered in writing:
- Will you ship a line-item breakdown — pulls, recycling stream, porter hours, bulk dispatch — before the contract is signed?
- Is the recycling stream included in the porter route, or priced separately?
- Are you quoting porter hours as a flat fee or only for hours actually worked — and what happens if a pass runs long?
- Is same-day bulk dispatch guaranteed on the porter line, or is it a best-effort add-on?
- What’s your off-schedule and missed-pickup credit policy — both for the trash route and for the porter route specifically?
If a vendor won’t answer any of those in writing, that’s the line item they’re not going to defend when the invoice arrives.
The porter-service version of “show your work”
Vendors who quote a single monthly rate for porter service are betting the property manager won’t audit the breakdown. The ones who ship a written scope, a named cadence, and a list of what’s in the line item are the ones who keep the same account at renewal — because the math stays auditable.