12,570 NZ property maintenance reviews, one pattern in all three: nobody mentions the invoice or the follow-up call.
A study of every publicly posted customer review across 186 cleaning, garden & outdoor, and pest control businesses. Customers rate the work and the people highly — and rarely mention the two things that make a repeat relationship actually work: an upfront price they can trust, and a follow-up after the job.
What do New Zealanders say about cleaning, garden, and pest control services?
Across 12,570 publicly posted reviews of NZ cleaning, garden & outdoor, and pest control businesses, satisfaction is very high — average scores of 98–99 out of 100. Value is the lowest-scoring of the four rated categories in every service type, and the two traits customers mention least often when praising a business are transparent/accurate pricing and following up after the job — the same two traits in the same order across all three service types.
Satisfaction is very high, and unusually consistent across three service types.
Across 12,570 reviews of cleaning, garden & outdoor, and pest control businesses, the average overall score is 98.1–99.1 out of 100 depending on the category, and 80–87% of reviews give a perfect score. Most jobs go well. Break the average into its four parts and one category drags the rest down, comfortably and consistently, in all three service types.
| Category | Communication | Quality | Reliability | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning services | 98.4 | 98.4 | 98.6 | 96.7 |
| Garden & outdoor | 98.9 | 99.1 | 99.0 | 97.9 |
| Pest control | 99.4 | 99.4 | 99.5 | 97.9 |
Value is the lowest of the four scores in every category. It’s a small gap on a scale where everything sits in the high 90s — this is not a category with a satisfaction problem — but the same relative pattern turning up in all three, independently, is a real signal, not noise from one dataset.
No, not in this corpus.
Review count and approval rating are essentially uncorrelated in all three categories:
| Category | Businesses | Correlation (review count vs. approval) |
|---|---|---|
| Cleaning services | 47 | r = 0.04 |
| Garden & outdoor | 120 | r = −0.02 |
| Pest control | 13 | r = 0.15 |
All three sit close to zero — there’s no size penalty to report here. A hypothesis, offered as a hypothesis, for why: cleaning, garden care and pest control are dominated by recurring relationships with the same customer — 51–61% of positive reviews across the three categories explicitly say they’d use the business again or recommend it, and a further 37–44% separately mention already having used the business repeatedly, not one-off callouts. A recurring relationship may be easier to keep track of at volume than a one-off job is, because it doesn’t reset with every visit. The corpus can’t prove this — it only shows what customers said, not how any business actually runs its admin — but it’s consistent with the finding.
The same two traits, top and bottom, in every category.
| Category (n positive reviews) | #1 most-praised | #2 most-praised | 2nd-least-praised | Least-praised |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning services (4,381) | Politeness 75.9% | Referral language 51.1% | Quote accuracy 4.2% | Aftercare follow-up 2.9% |
| Garden & outdoor (6,148) | Politeness 72.6% | Referral language 60.6% | Emergency availability 2.1% | Aftercare follow-up 1.4% |
| Pest control (1,850) | Politeness 69.0% | Referral language 56.7% | Transparent pricing 13.2%† | Quote accuracy 3.0% |
†Pest control’s own second-least-praised trait is tidiness (9.6%); transparent pricing sits mid-table at 13.2%, still bottom-third but not bottom-two. Quote accuracy and aftercare follow-up are the two consistent laggards across all three categories, every time.
Politeness and referral language lead here too, with even higher referral numbers than we’ve seen in other service categories. Quote accuracy and aftercare follow-up are the two traits customers are least likely to specifically mention when they’re happy, in all three categories, every time.
A thin sample, said plainly.
Negative reviews (any dimension below 50/100) are rare across all three categories: 1.2% of cleaning-services reviews, 0.4% of garden-outdoor reviews, 0.5% of pest-control reviews. Only cleaning-services has enough negative reviews (55, just over our reporting threshold) to break into complaint categories at all — garden-outdoor’s negative sample is about 25 reviews and pest-control’s is about 9, both too thin to categorise with any confidence.
For cleaning-services, the one category with usable complaint data: overcharging and communication delay are tied for the top complaint (7.3% each of the 55 negative reviews), narrowly ahead of rude staff (5.5%) and workmanship (3.6%). This is directionally consistent with the value-score and quote-accuracy findings above, but it’s a single-category, 55-review sample — the praise-side pattern (all three categories, thousands of reviews each) is the stronger evidence here.
Only two regions clear our anonymisation threshold.
Only Auckland and Wellington have enough businesses in the corpus to report regionally for cleaning-services and garden-outdoor — pest control can only be reported at Auckland (Wellington’s 2 businesses fail the same threshold). See the methodology page for the exact rule.
| Category | Auckland | Wellington |
|---|---|---|
| Cleaning services | 98.0 | 98.0 |
| Garden & outdoor | 98.8 | 98.8 |
| Pest control | 99.1 | — (suppressed, 2 businesses) |
Auckland and Wellington are effectively identical for cleaning-services and garden-outdoor — no regional story to tell there, stated plainly rather than manufactured.
Mixed, and small either way.
Garden-outdoor moved up slightly (+0.1 points, 2025 to 2026); cleaning-services and pest-control moved down slightly (−1.1 and −0.1 points respectively). None of these are large moves on a scale where everything sits in the high 90s. Review volume is trending down each year across all three categories in this snapshot, but 2026 is a partial year at crawl time, so that’s a pace artefact, not a claim that fewer people are reviewing these businesses over time.
Two steps, each one anchored to a number.
The praise data tells a consistent story across three categories with nothing in common but the review platform: customers rate the work and the relationship highly, and they almost never specifically mention the two things a recurring service relationship depends on most.
- 01No upfront, transparent price the customer can point back to — transparent pricing and quote accuracy sit in the bottom half of every praise table, and where complaint data exists (cleaning-services), overcharging is the joint-top complaint. For a recurring relationship, an unclear price is something the customer has to re-litigate, or quietly tolerate, every visit.
- 02No deliberate follow-up after the job — aftercare follow-up is the least-, or second-least-, praised trait in every category (1.4–2.9%). For a business whose entire model depends on the customer coming back, it’s a gap in the part of the relationship that’s supposed to turn one job into the next one.
Worth saying plainly: none of this is costing these businesses their reputation as they grow — this looks like a genuine process gap sitting inside businesses that are, on this evidence, otherwise running well at any size. Politeness (69–76%) and referral language (51–61%) are strong and consistent across all three categories and all business sizes. The gap is specifically in the two moments — the price conversation and the after-the-fact check-in — that turn a satisfied one-off customer into whatever makes 51–61% of reviewers say they’d use the business again.
Full corpus, collection method, scoring, coding, thresholds and platform name are stated on the methodology page. This is public reviews, not a random sample of every job done; correlation, not causation, on the size-vs-reputation pattern; small percentages on small bases are reported as rank order, not precision measurement. Figures are candidate findings pending internal promotion to verified status.
