The Stamford Advocate
March 3, 2006

By Vesna Jaksic

The smell of bleach filled the bathroom of downtown apartment recently as Flora Ortiz got ready to scrub everything from the doorknob to the toilet bowl.

“I like to pay attention to all the little things and clean everything,” the Stamford resident said. “I don’t like to use a broom. I clean everything with my hands.”

The bathroom is one of dozens of rooms Ortiz cleans each week as the owner of Flora’s Cleaning Service, a small Stamford cleaning company. Others in the household services industry include housekeepers, laundry workers, maids, butlers and chauffeurs.

Hundreds of such workers – mostly immigrants – clean the homes of busy mothers and working fathers and ensure that practically all the needs of the area’s richest residents are met. Those in the closely related commercial cleaning industry keep local offices sparkling. Fairfield County’s wealth, fast-paced lifestyle and spacious real estate are a winning recipe for those who provide such services. As office buildings rise and mansions expand, these businesses have been playing a quiet but powerful role in the local economy.

Although the business owners said it is challenging to find workers who speak English, possess work papers and have valid driver’s licenses, they also said business is booming. Rosemary Peck, who owns Regal Domestics Ltd., a Greenwich-based agency that matches domestic workers with employers, said demand will likely continue to grow.

“The market in this area is big,” she said. “Many, many homes have domestic staff and there is a real need for them.”

The average price of homes sold in Greenwich last year exceeded $2 million, and it is not unheard of to find residences with as many as 15 bedrooms.

“You look at the size of homes in Greenwich and you know that those homes need more than one person taking care of it. And it’s usually not the lady of the house,” Peck said.

Demand for domestic services also is high outside of Greenwich. Flora’s Cleaning Service’s Ortiz said she once cleaned a 14-bedroom house for a lawyer in North Stamford. The business she founded in 1988 employs seven cleaners, who work in about 30 homes a week in Stamford, Greenwich, Norwalk, New Canaan and Westport, she said.

Like many in the industry, Ortiz is an immigrant, having moved here from Peru in 1968. This can present challenges for employers because many immigrants don’t have the documents to work in the United States, don’t speak English well enough to communicate with employers or don’t have driver’s licenses that would allow them to work flexible hours.

“We turn people away every week, people who would like to work here that we can’t hire because they are not eligible,” said Robin Murphy, owner of the Pleasantville, N.Y.-based Maid Brigade, which cleans many Fairfield County homes.

Some employers confessed to employing immigrants who are here illegally and others told anecdotes about businesses being run under the table.

According to 2004 statistics from the state Department of Labor, the last year for which data was available, employees in “personal and laundry services” and “private households” in the Bridgeport-Stamford area earned an average of about $26,000 a year.

Many area homes are cleaned by small, privately run businesses, but local office buildings tend to employ larger companies, such as Temco Service Industries Inc., a New York-based company with 10,000 employees and $300 million in revenues.

All commercial buildings need cleaning, maintenance and support services, but the financial industry probably invests the most in such services because of its high profits, said Michael Freimuth, Stamford’s director of economic development. In Stamford, where the finance sector accounts for 13 percent of the local economy, every finance job typically creates two or three support jobs, which include cleaners, drivers, cafeteria and maintenance workers, he said.

Employers and industry reports indicate demand for these services will continue to rise. The $46 billion U.S. commercial and residential cleaning industry will grow 5.5 percent annually through 2009 because of a trend toward more business outsourcing and the fact that more consumers are not willing to clean their homes, according to a report issued in May by Freedonia Group, an international business research company.

Many people said Fairfield County’s deep pockets and high immigrant population make it a haven for the industry. The area’s steep prices also drive demand for such services, said Jack Condlin, president of the Stamford Chamber of Commerce.

“Two-parent income is needed to sustain a quality of life here because of the high cost of living in the area, and, as a result of that, people have less of their own personal time,” he said. “It’s normal for people in mansions to have domestic help, but I think what’s happened here is having this support, this help from people maintaining lawns and domestic help, has trickled down to the average homeowner.”

Murphy, whose Maid Brigade gets about 70 calls a week, said the client base has become more broad since the business opened in 1996.

“I expected my business to be dual-income families with kids, and there is that, but we clean for a lot of seniors . . . we clean for a lot of bachelors and people who also have full-time, live-in help with houses that have 15 bathrooms,” she said.

Most cleaning companies charge based on how often the service is requested and the size of the house. Quotes ranged from $75 for a one-bedroom apartment to more than $1,000 for a Greenwich mansion with 10 bathrooms.